On Jun 7, 2005, at 11:12 PM, Talin wrote:
Unfortunately, having the licensing terms appear only in the program
output places a signficant barrier to a legal analysis of the
licensing terms.
The way my company's evaluation process works is that I can't simply
compile bison myself, generate the output file, and email a copy of it
to our lawyer. Generally what the legal department wants is a URL so
that they can examine the provenance of the information as well as its
content. (To a lawyer, documents are not "context-free" - two
documents that are byte-for-byte identical, but come from two
different sources are effectively two different documents.)
While I am certainly gratified that our lawyers have enough technical
savvy to be able to download a source archive, unpack it, and ready
the COPYING file themselves, I don't expect them to be able to
successfully configure, compile, and run the program (especially given
that they probably don't even have a compiler installed on their
Window XP boxes.)
There are two license issues here. The first one is for Bison itself.
That is GPL. The other license issue is the output that Bison
produces. According to the version of Bison I have, src/bison.simple
says:
[snip]
/* As a special exception, when this file is copied by Bison into a
Bison output file, you may use that output file without restriction.
This special exception was added by the Free Software Foundation
in version 1.24 of Bison. */
[snip]
The problem is that the output of Bison uses Bison source code itself.
However, if you generate a file, the following license is included:
/* Skeleton output parser for bison,
Copyright (C) 1984, 1989, 1990, 2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software
Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. */
/* As a special exception, when this file is copied by Bison into a
Bison output file, you may use that output file without restriction.
This special exception was added by the Free Software Foundation
in version 1.24 of Bison. */
I don't know where this is specifically mentioned on the Bison site
though...
Aaron
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