Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!chinet!ignatz
From: ignatz@chinet.chi.il.us (Dave Ihnat)
Newsgroups: alt.sources
Subject: Re: Re^2: MS-DOS PD lex and yacc
Message-ID: <9288@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 16 Aug 89 20:16:35 GMT
References: <8300001@hpccc.HP.COM> <201802wv4bX.01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>
Reply-To: ignatz@chinet.chi.il.us (Dave Ihnat)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 20

In article <201802wv4bX.01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> dacseg@uts.amdahl.com (Scott E. Garfinkle) writes:
>
>I'll buy that for flex, but you must know that not only is bison decidedly
>*not* public domain (though it is free), it is almost worthless for
>most commercial endeavors.  I do *not* wish to start yet another running
>debate on FSF's copyleft -- personally I use bison quite a lot, but always
>for software to be distributed within the terms of the Gnu General License.
>I only write this followup to ensure that someone does not naively misuse
>the Gnu software. 

The gist of this is that, because the GNU copyleft is included with the BISON
parser files, your application then must be redistributable under the same
terms.  This is not true.  You might, at most, be responsible for providing
the GNU parser include files as source, on request--in which case, you would
most likely provide the entire GNU package.  But RMS and company cannot require
you to release your code on the basis of their include file.

If this were the case, then the object code compiled by many commercial micro
compilers would belong to the vendor providing the compiler, since many include
a copyright notice in the object code.