Re: filebench: bison generated parser + CDDL

[Evan Lavelle]

You'll never get an answer from the FSF on licensing; they'll just send 
you a form mail asking you for money. So, don't bother asking.

You have to ask yourself two questions:

1 - Is filebench a parser generator? From what you've said, it seems 
that it isn't. If it isn't a parser generator (ie. if it just *contains* 
a parser, and it isn't a program (like yacc/Bison/Antlr/etc) which 
actually *creates* a parser) then you can distribute filebench under any 
licence you want, even though you have used Bison to generate a parser 
which you have included in filebench, and even though filebench uses the 
Bison skeleton. This much is obvious; Bison would be unusable in most 
environments without this exception.

2 - Do you actually *want* to distribute filebench with a *more* 
restrictive licence that contaminates the rest of your code, and 
restricts your ability to distribute your code freely? If so, you can. 
This is what the "Alternatively" section is about. You can completely 
ignore the "Alternatively" section, unless you have some sort of 
ideology issue with licences.

I think your confusion is:

> It is less clear than I thought.
>
> Let A be a work with a parser generated by bison and assume that A is not a
> parser generator. It appears that the exception allows the authors of A to
> place A under any license they want to, effectively overriding the
> GPL-and-exception. Suppose they choose something like the MIT license. Then

No - you can't over-ride the "GPL-and-exception". You can only over-ride 
the "-and-exception":

> | Alternatively, if you modify or redistribute
> | the parser skeleton itself, you may (at your option) remove this
> | special exception, which will cause the skeleton and the resulting
> | Bison output files to be licensed under the GNU General Public
> | License without this special exception.

In other words, you can make the licensing *more* restrictive, by 
reverting back to GPL, but you can't make it *less* restrictive.

I'm sure you're Ok. But, if you're really concerned, you can always 
switch to Antlr, which has a free licence, rather than a "Free" licence.

-Evan