Re: [Question]:Question about bison adding GPL copyright to the parser files generated by bison and yacc.c
Christian Schoenebeck <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.parsers.bison.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <2025525.iP1Qj8VeRg@silver> |
On Samstag, 26. Januar 2019 14:31:06 CET Hans Åberg wrote: > > On 21 Jan 2019, at 17:24, bird bravo <[email protected]> wrote: > > I noticed that when I use bison and the parser skeleton(yacc.c) to > > > > generate a parser file... there will be a copyright notice to claim the > > file is a GPLV3 and an exception declaration... I wanna know is that OK to > > use and distribute the parser file as I wish.. > > Yes, see [1]. The copyright applies to the skeleton code which is copied > over to the generated parser, but there is an exception added for that. > > 1. https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Conditions.html No, that's not what the exception sais. The exception applies (and hence the freedom to distribute a Bison generated parser under any arbitrary, different license than GPL) only if the generated parser is not itself a parser generator. This is not as obvious as you might think. It really depends on what his generated parser is capable to do. I give you a simple example: let's say you used Bison to develop a tool which converts source code from one programming language A to B. Now you might think this is not a parser generator. Well, it was obviously not your intention. But now consider somebody uses that conversion tool for converting a parser originally written in programming language A to language B. Right, your Bison generated conversion tool just generated a parser. Best regards, Christian Schoenebeck _______________________________________________ [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-bison