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I want to make a videogame using a proprietary license. It would utilize the SDL library and POSIX. From my understanding, every modern platform uses POSIX except for Windows. To fix this, when building for Windows, I want to link with Cygwin.
Cygwin is licensed under the LGPL with special exceptions for linking proprietary software. If I wanted to distribute this software via a platform like Steam, and distribute Cygwin with it, and link my proprietary game with it, could I?
Yes, you can.
If you statically link to the Cygwin library, the linking exception allows you to just distribute your application without consideration for the fact that you use Cygwin.
If you dynamically link to the Cygwin library and include that DLL in your distribution, then you have to comply with the LGPL requirements for distributing LGPL code. This means you have to include a copy of the license used by Cygwin and you have to tell your users where they can get a copy of the sources of Cygwin.
