Cygwin Commerial License?

[David J. Fiddes]

Hi,

> > Alternatively, I could setup a linux box at work to do the development
> > without cygwin.  I assume it is acceptable to create a closed-source
> > commercial application using gnu tools, newlib and rtems in a linux
> > environment?

Yes it is perfectly acceptable to do with Cygwin. The licence that you
refer to is for the Cygwin1.dll and associated libraries not for the
other portions of the Cygwin system. The cygwin1.dll licence allows free
use provided that the applications that are *linked to it* are GPLd.
When building RTEMS you are only using (not distributing) Cygwin hosted
applications so this does not apply.

There is nothing to stop you building closed source RTEMS applications
provided you make any changes to the RTEMS executive(i.e the bit covered
by the GPL) available to your customers (or us ;).

> Gumby handled the licensing.  Let me throw a technical issue your way.
> In general, Cygwin is slower and less stable than Linux (or a *BSD).
> I have seen trouble running cvs with the files on a network (admittedly
> netware) server.

These issues are being addressed and Cygwin is much better now that it
was say 12 months ago. Cygwin will never be quick though...it's
emulating one API(posix) on top of another (Win32). A modestly spec'd
Linux box will always outperform a Cygwin/NT setup on a "fast" machine.

If you need a decent terminal then you can still use Cygwin with a
genuine copy of telnet ;)

Dave