Re: filebench: bison generated parser + CDDL

[Akim Demaille]

Hi all,

Dropping CC is quite impolite, especially when it is to write about
the missing person.

Le 1 août 2012 à 09:59, Martin Steigerwald a écrit :

> 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)…

I don't know them, but I believe that Evan Lavelle's statements are
untrue.  They do charge companies that ask questions about proprietary
software, but the rest is free of charge.  There can be mistakes, of
course, if the context is not clearly established, which is not the
case here.

I have no idea why they have not answered yet, but pretending that
it's because of money is not right.  I would rather venture that their
backlog is large.

And again, when the exception was designed for Bison, the point was
to have people be able to use it in wider contexts than free software.
Using its generated parsers in proprietary software is fine.

>> 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
> 
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