gnu-win32 licensing terms

[Fergus Henderson]

Another installment in the on-going gnu-win32 licencing terms saga:
good news -- Cygnus have changed the licencing terms yet again;
this time the conditions include GPL as one of the options, which
should be acceptable for our use.

Cheers,
	Fergus.

P.S. For anyone interested, the message from Cygnus follows.

--------------------

Several weeks ago I posted our planned new licensing terms for
Cygwin32.  We have received a lot of useful feedback from people in
response.  Cygnus listens.  In response we have decided to further
revise the licensing terms.

We want to ensure Cygwin32 continues to be made available to the net
community under terms that they find reasonable.  We want to continue
to work with, cooperate with, and to be considered a part of the net
community.  We draw our roots from the net, and we want to contribute
back to the net.  And so it is with Cygnwin32.  We do not want a
portion of the net community to be unable to use Cygwin32 because of
the licensing terms.

(The new licensing terms were drafted in such a way as to ensure
Cygwin32 continued to be freely available to the net community.  The
only restriction we imposed was on use of Cygwin32 by Cygnus'
embedded competitors.  However, we perhaps a little naively failed
to realize that some people on the net community would have problems
with the licensing terms, not because the license prevented them
from using the software, but because they were unhappy with a license
that contained any restrictions, irrespective of whether the
restrictions directly impacted their use of the software.  This had
not been our intent in coming up with the license).

Our new licensing terms are still being prepared so I can't present
them to you yet, however I can explain their intended flavor.

Our new licensing terms will permit Cygwin32 to be used under the
terms of the GPL, and also under a separate commercial use license
that frees people from the constraints of the GPL.  The precise terms
of this separate commercial use license have yet to be determined.
Once we have determined the precise terms we will announce the new
license here.

One of the things we are presently considering is charging a fee for
use of Cygwin32 under the commercial use license.  Use of Cygwin32
under the terms of the GPL would remain free of charge.  (If we decide
to charge fees for commercial use, they would probably be in line with
the fees we charge for our commercial GNUPro compilers: in the range
$2-3k for a single developer, $7-15k for up to five developers, and
$25-50k for up to twenty five developers).  If you have any thoughts
on our charging fees for the commercial use of Cygwin32, please feel
free to email me.

To ensure no one might have been mislead by our previously announced
new licensing terms, you are free to make use of the current beta 18
release of Cygwin32 under the previously announced Cygwin32 Version
1.0 license.

                                     regards,
                                              Gordon Irlam
                                              Cygnus Solutions