From: Eli Green <eli.green@...>
Date: 2001-10-30T17:04:42+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23818] Re: Ruby's use of cygwin and commercial use!

from Phil Tomson on 2001-10-30 at 04:31:41:
> In article <3BDBCDB6.7000901@hotmail.com>,
> Sunil Hadap  <hadap@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I am considering jumping into ruby. I plan to use ruby as embedded 
> >language for potentially commercial software. I understood the Ruby's 
> >license. However, for win32, I realized that it uses cygwin. How people 
> >typically address licensing problem associated with cygwin. Do I have to 
> >buy license for cygwin.dll and for each copy of it.
> 
> What is the licensing issue with cygwin?  As far as I can tell, cygwin is 
> licensed under the GPL, but I could be wrong.  If it's GPL'd you wouldn't 
> have to buy any license for the dll.  There is also minGW as well, which 
> I believe is also under GPL.

The GPL is viral, which is great for stuff you don't mind releasing, but not
so great for people who want to sell software. But as already stated, the
Win32 version can be compiled with MinGW or VC++ very easily, avoiding any GPL
issues.

The only thing that Cygwin provides for you that you will NOT be able to do
with VC++ or MinGW versions of Ruby is fork. But I don't particularily trust
the fork implementation under Cygwin anyways, so I'd personally recommend not
using it. (Read the details of the implementation sometimes ... it's
impressive, but not exactly clean).

-- 
Eli Green