[SDL] License question (OT)

[Peter Strempel]

On Sun, 01 Feb 2004 23:57:57 +0100, Alexander Bussman <buxman at telia.com> 
wrote:

> But then I thought, do my application need to be GPL because cygwin is 
> licensed under GPL?
> Anyone here that knows this, that could explain it for me?

There are two editions of cygwin available. The free edition only allows 
you to distribute applications which are open source. I don't know if it 
needs to be GPL or can be another OSI-approved licence, check the cygwin 
webpage for details. But I would expect some BSD, MIT or Apache licence 
should be ok, too.

If you want to distribute closed-source software with cygwin, you need to 
buy the commercial cygwin release.

Unless you really do need the cygwin POSIX layer, you should also have a 
look at MinGW, which is basically GCC-for-Win32 without the POSIX stuff of 
cygwin. MinGW does not have any licence restrictions for your 
applications, you can use it for commercial closed-source projects. Most 
people do not need the cygwin POSIX layer and MinGW is sufficient.


  Peter