Re: bison as a library?

[Hans Aberg]

At 17:40 -0800 2003/02/25, Brian wrote:
>so, is there a way to use bison as a library that I am not aware of?  If
>not, would such a change to bison be accepted by the official
>distribution?  Would such a change be overly difficult or messy to
>implement?

If you speak about the copyright, I think that it prohibits such a thing
and that is just how the GNU folks want it: I had some discussions with RMS
about this, and he was opposed to even turning Bison into a plugin for use
in an IDE.

But note that copyright is essentially a business law, meaning that if
there are no potential business concerns involved or hurt, other laws have
precedence. So as long you do not do modifications in any way that hurts
the copyright owner's potential businesses right, it should be OK.

I am not sure what this might mean in practise with respect to software
that labels it as free of charge and say when the modifications are done
for educational or research purposes. If you have some on-campus lawyer,
you might check with them.

  Hans Aberg