Re: Gnat 3.09 NT - Legal issues

[kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

In article <5dnpk4$iq9@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> fjh@murlibobo.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) writes:
>If the code generated by GNAT for NT/Win95 using cynwin32 really doesn't 
>include any of the libcygwin.a code, could you perhaps explain to us
>how (technically speaking) you avoided that?

99% of libcygwin.a is automatically-generated jump vectors to
cygwin32.dll, which is GPL'ed, but not included in the generated
executable.  The rest of the files used to build that library, plus
the file used to build crt0.o, constitute only a handful of files,
some of which were copyrighted under the Berkeley copyright, which
imposes no restrictions.  For the remaining couple of files, which
were tiny, we rebuilt libcygwin.a using the sources of those files
from an earlier version of Cygwin32, when they did not have GPL
copyrights.

Thefore no code contained in the user's executable is covered by the
unmodified GPL (the GNAT run-time-library sources are covered by a
modified version of the GPL which permits use of the objects, without
restrictions, in user executables).