From 346e50fd696d650a2aa27c0499dac9407602ae18 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Keith Marshall
Originated by Steve Chamberlain, in 1995, like MinGW, +Cygwin is a system which aims to make (primarily) GNU tools +available on the MS‑Windows platform; +however, the two systems adopt entirely different  +methodologies to achieve this objective. +
+Both systems are based on GNU tooling,
+and both use the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) as the means
+of production for their respective application suites.
+Since GNU is fundamentally a POSIX system,
+both MinGW and Cygwin tools exhibit a POSIX feel;
+however, whereas MinGW strives to minimize its POSIX influence,
+using the MS‑Windows API directly, 
+and thus,
+MinGW applications may be classified as native 
+MS‑Windows applications,
+Cygwin has a much loftier objective ... it aims to provide a complete
+emulation of the entire  POSIX.1 API!
+This emulation is encapsulated within a single cygwin1.dll
+shared object library, which serves as a bridge between the POSIX.1 API
+and the MS‑Windows API, and upon which all 
+Cygwin applications are dependent; consequently,
+Cygwin applications are not  classified
+as native  MS‑Windows applications.
+
The availability of the POSIX.1 API,
+furnished by cygwin1.dll
, does generally reduce
+the effort required to port GNU applications to Cygwin,
+(for example, POSIX functions such as fork()
,
+mmap()
, and ioctl()
may not be
+readily  implemented in terms of the MS‑Windows API,
+and would require significant  porting
+effort — if indeed it is even
+feasible — to
+support them in MinGW applications);
+however, the reduced porting burden of Cygwin does 
+incur the cost of the dependency on cygwin1.dll
,
+and its attendant commercial,
+or strict “copyleft ” (GPL),
+licensing requirement.
+
A contraction of “Minimal SYStem”, -- 2.11.0