Hi Kenton,
Protocol Buffers presents an unusual, but not unique/novel, situation
with respect to licensing.
Projects that use PB will often not actually include PB code in their
software (and often may not be re-distributing PB code in source or
compiled form), but rather, will be using the output of PB, which is
code. What is the license of that output-code? That's the type of
question that makes lawyers nervous.
This is similar to the bison situation. Bison is GPL v2. But
obviously not all programs that use Bison output are GPL v2. Bison
output includes explicit license notice:
_____________________________
/* Skeleton parser for Yacc-like parsing with Bison,
Copyright (C) 1984, 1989, 1990, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004,
2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.
...<snip>... */
/* As a special exception, when this file is copied by Bison into a
Bison output file, you may use that output file without restriction.
This special exception was added by the Free Software Foundation
in version 1.24 of Bison. */
_____________________________
Can there be explicit clarification on that point? Maybe a notice on
the output to the effect:
// Generated by the protocol buffer compiler.
// Any copyright ownership is retained by the owner of the input to
the protocol buffer compiler.
I don't know if that's the best wording (IANAL), but I think that
gives you the flavor of what I'm thinking.
But then, flex output (where flex is also presumably GPL) doesn't
include any explicit notice of licensing at all. I seem to recall
that bison was 'special' because some code was copied as a verbatim
chunk. I don't know if PB includes any such chunks. Either way,
being explicit about it may smooth the path in many cases.
-Travis
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