Unfortunately, having the licensing terms appear only in the program
output places a signficant barrier to a legal analysis of the licensing
terms.
The way my company's evaluation process works is that I can't simply
compile bison myself, generate the output file, and email a copy of it
to our lawyer. Generally what the legal department wants is a URL so
that they can examine the provenance of the information as well as its
content. (To a lawyer, documents are not "context-free" - two documents
that are byte-for-byte identical, but come from two different sources
are effectively two different documents.)
While I am certainly gratified that our lawyers have enough technical
savvy to be able to download a source archive, unpack it, and ready the
COPYING file themselves, I don't expect them to be able to successfully
configure, compile, and run the program (especially given that they
probably don't even have a compiler installed on their Window XP boxes.)
Aaron Jackson wrote:
On Jun 5, 2005, at 3:06 PM, Talin wrote:
Greetings,
I'm writing you because of some confusion about the licensing terms
for Bison. In particular, my understanding is that Bison output is
permitted to be incorporated into non-free programs. However, when I
browse through the source distribution of Bison, I don't find a clear
statement to that effect.
Look at the output of bison. The license within the output is very
clear.
Aaron
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