Re: filebench: bison generated parser + CDDL

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Dienstag, 31. Juli 2012 schrieb 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.

I wonder how that does align with their mission (if its true what you write, I 
don't know cause I have no previous experience)…

> 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.

That is how I understood the exception clause as well, but then Mark argued 
otherwise. 

filebench is a file based I/O benchmark tool which parses workload 
descriptions. 
For that it uses the parser that Bison generated. It is by my understanding 
clearly not a parser generator.

> 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.

Thing I explained in my original post is that filebench is CDDL.

And my sole question was whether the GPL + exception license of bison does 
allow for filebench that uses a bison generated parser that carries the GPL + 
exception license notice in its source files to be distributed under the CDDL. 
And in my understanding it does.

filebench upstream developers seem to agree as well, since they distribute 
filebench as such.

> 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":

I think the lines Mark was thinking is that someone could use Bison, base a 
work that is not a parser generator, then use the exception to change the 
license to some un-free license and after doing so make a parser generator out 
of this work again, caue the stuff is now under the un-free license that does 
not have either GPL or exception.

But a) if its not a parser generator anymore some parts of Bison might have to 
be re-implemented and b) I find this rather far fetched.

I agree that is not allowed to remove the GPL from the original bison source 
code as well, only the exception.

Anyway…

> > | 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.

… I tend to think that as well and so propose to having filebench reviewed and 
sponsored but point the FTP masters to this discussion so they can veto and 
refuse to upload if need be. I don't have any other idea on how to move this 
forward ATM.

But I still wonder what at most the consequences could be when there is an 
issue with releasing filebench that way… it can at any point be removed from 
the archive, if someone raises a valid concern.

I would have liked to get a clear statement from an official side.

Ciao,
-- 
Martin Steigerwald - teamix GmbH - http://www.teamix.de
gpg: 19E3 8D42 896F D004 08AC A0CA 1E10 C593 0399 AE90