🚀 go-pugleaf

   Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1991 17:03:19 GMT
   Organization: Lehman Brothers
   From: rtroost@ashley.shearson.com (Rens Troost)
   Sender: gnu-misc-discuss-request@cis.ohio-state.edu

   In article <1991Dec16.222630.7930@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:
   ...
   < stuff deleted >
   ...

      Note that byacc and Bison were written by the same person (hi,
      Bob!), and that byacc is in the public domain, while Bison is
      copylefted (and programs that use Bison fall under the GPL
      themselves!).

Note that rms and other gnu volunteers have done a lot of work on
Bison since Bob finished with it.

   Ahem - I think not. I recall a thread in misc.gnu.discuss about two
   years ago in which it was concluded that use of gnu development
   tools does not free the program so generated. This I think was
   accepted by Tower, at least. (Correct me If I'm wrong, please.)

   -Rens rens@{ shearson.com, cs.columbia.edu}

The output of Bison is covered by the GPL.  A substantial piece of
C-code is included to do the actual parsing.  The code is GPL'ed.
Linking it with other code creates a derived work and causes the whole
work to be copylefted.

The output of GCC and most other GNU development tools don't include
copylefted code, so the legal status is not changed by use of these
tools.

FSF may put the Bison parser under the new GNU Library General Public
License which would alleviate this problem.  Depends on how much use
and improvement FSF sees from the proprietrary crowd for lib-g++ and
the GNU libc.

thanx -len