MSVC binaries not a GPL violation

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Aug-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| I don't know if this FAQ entry was in place back in 2009 but I can't
| remember this being discussed since:
| 
|      
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#WindowsRuntimeAndGPL

My memory may be faulty on this, but as I remember, the issue was not
about compiling Octave and linking with MSVC, but about distributing
the MSVC run-time with Octave binaries.  OK, here is the statement
from the FSF's licensing guru about this issue:

  https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/octave-maintainers/2009-May/015921.html

| Although I'm not sure if this is much consolation. Is the MSVC build
| any easier than mingw32? I see the MSVC work is still under svn
| history in Octave-Forge. Also, I'm very concerned with building the
| GUI under Windows, and I don't see an easy solution for ptys if Cygwin
| isn't one.  Can a Cygwin build be easily distributed so that Windows
| users don't immediately detect the foreign presence of Unix?

There are some problems with distributing the Cygwin DLL with
applications.  I don't remember the precise details, but think it can
cause trouble if there is another Cygwin DLL on the system that
doesn't match.  In any case, I do remember that the Cygwin developers
strongly discourage people from distributing the Cygwin DLL with their
applications.  Take a look at the FAQ here:

  http://cygwin.com/faq.html

starting with question 4.19.

There are also some problems with using Cygwin if you want to have
your application look like a "native Windows" application.  Things
like whether/how you handle file names for example.

What does Cygwin do to emulate ptys?  Can that be extracted from
Cygwin and used separately without having to use all of Cygwin?  It
would be great if gnulib provided a pty module that worked on Windows
systems, but it is not there currently.

jwe