Re: Bison COPYING confusion

[Talin]

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.)

Aaron Jackson wrote:

> On Jun 5, 2005, at 3:06 PM, Talin wrote:
>
> > Greetings,
> >
> > I'm writing you because of some confusion about the licensing terms 
> > for Bison. In particular, my understanding is that Bison output is 
> > permitted to be incorporated into non-free programs. However, when I 
> > browse through the source distribution of Bison, I don't find a clear 
> > statement to that effect.
>
>
>
> Look at the output of bison.  The license within the output is very 
> clear.
>
> Aaron