Re: Bison COPYING confusion

[Aaron Jackson]

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