Re: Bison licensing issues

[Hans Aberg]

First always keep the cc to the Help-Bison list so that others may help.

Then second, it is best to read the GNU license in the parser output,  
as suggested by another poster. There is a general principle of  
copyright treaty and copyright law, though, that the work you are  
doing is always copyrighted to you, and that copyright ownership  
cannot be abrogated except by yourself. A GNU license can restrict  
the uses of the GNU human copyrighted work, but it does not apply to  
the processing any computer program does though, since no human is  
involved creatively in that. So Bison processing itself cannot  
abrogate your copyrights. You can put your copyrights as notices in  
the .y file if you so want, because (I think) it is just copied over  
verbatim, though material nowadays automatically become copyrighted  
regardless of such notices. Also see:
  http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/index.html
  http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/trtdocs_wo033.html
  http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html


On 1 Dec 2005, at 09:49, Anup V (RBIN/ECB-T1) * wrote:

> Dear Mr. Aberg,
> Thank you very much for your reply. I would like to know this:
>
> 1. We plan to use Bison to generate code for us for a commercial
> application. Now, should we distribute the sources of our commercial
> application to the outside world because it used Bison to generate  
> code
> ?
>
> 2. If yes, then what is the alternative, as we would want our source
> code to be our private property.
>
>
> Thanks and Regards
> Anup
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
>  Anup. V
>  Robert Bosch India Ltd.
>  Bangalore - 560095,
>  Karnataka, India
>
>  Phone : +91-80-5109 5332
>  Email : address@hidden
> ------------------------------------------------------
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hans Aberg [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Wednesday, 30. November 2005 11:44 PM
> To: Anup V (RBIN/ECB-T1) *
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Bison licensing issues
>
> On 30 Nov 2005, at 12:37, Anup V (RBIN/ECB-T1) * wrote:
>
> > I would like to use Bison for a commercial application. Could you
> > please
> > let me know if I can use it without any problem. If not, could you
> > please let me know the licensing issues w.r.t Bison.
>
> I think that the state of the matter (of the most recent Bison
> versions), is that you can freely use the C-parser in a commercial
> application, the same way that you can use GCC libraries and the
> like. Check the notice in the parser sources that Bison writes. The
> copyrighting of this parser only applies to the parts that derives
> from the skeleton file. The other parts deriving from the grammar you
> write is copyrighted to you. As for the GLR and C++ parsers, they may
> have different copyrighting notices, but may be synced in the future
> as to become what the C-parser has today.
>
>    Hans Aberg