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From: george@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (George R. Boyce)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: distributing gnu - let's think again
Message-ID: <389@gvax.cs.cornell.edu>
Date: Tue, 20-May-86 17:40:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: gvax.389
Posted: Tue May 20 17:40:29 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 24-May-86 02:14:44 EDT
References: <5373@alice> <2633@teddy.UUCP>
Reply-To: george@gvax.UUCP (George R. Boyce)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 19

In article <2633@teddy.UUCP> jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson) writes:
>
>I recently obtained a copy of BISON (the GNU yacc equivalent).  It appears
>that every C file genrated by BISON contains the GNU copyright.  I contacted
>Richard Stallman to make sure this was not accidental - his reply was that
>this copyright was included in the generated C source file because it includes
>a copy of the parser written by him.  To the best of my understanding, this
>implies that I cannot sell any program that uses BISON to generate a parser
>- In fact, I must be willing to give away that C source.
>

It is not all that unusual that a company (1) prohibit you from using a
product for comercial gain and/or (2) charge you a royalty fee when you
sell a product produced by their product. These actions are almost always
taken to protect the commercial value of the first company's product. RMS
takes a slightly different approach and for an entirely different reason.

I suggest that if you think you didn't get your money's worth that you should
ask for your money back. I'm sure that RMS will refund your license fee :-).