Cygwin: A Free Win32 Porting Layer for UNIX Applications

4. "Harnessing the Power of the Internet"

Instead of keeping the Cygwin technology proprietary and developing it in-house, Cygnus chose to make it publicly available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the traditional license for the GNU tools. Since its inception, we have made a new "Cygwin beta release" available via ftp over the Internet every three or four months. Each release includes binaries of Cygwin and the development tools, coupled with the source code needed to build them. Unlike standard Cygnus products, these free releases come without any assurances of quality or support, although we provide a mailing list that is used for discussion and feedback.

In retrospect, making the technology freely available was a good decision because of the high demand for quality 32-bit native tools in the Win32 arena, as well as significant additional interest in a UNIX portability layer like Cygwin. While far from perfect, the beta releases are good enough for many people. They provide us with tens of thousands of interested developers who are willing to use and test the tools. A few of them are even willing to contribute code fixes and new functionality to the library. As of the last public release, developers on the Net had written or improved a significant portion of the library, including important aspects such as support for UNIX signals and the TTY/PTY calls.

In order to spur as much Net participation as possible, the Cygwin project features an open development model. We make daily source snapshots of the Cygwin library available to the general public in addition to the periodic full Cygwin tools releases. A developers' mailing list facilitates discussion of proposed changes to the library.

In addition to the GPL version of Cygwin, Cygnus provides a commercial license for supported customers of the native Win32 GNUPro tools.