Re: Bison Skeleton: irksome GPL license.

[Kaz Kylheku]

On 2018-04-16 13:27, Hans Åberg wrote:
> > On 16 Apr 2018, at 22:01, Kaz Kylheku <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > When Bison turns a .y file into a y.tab.c, it removes any license
> > header from the .y file, and asserts its own license over the file
> > (which comes from the parser skeleton).
>
> > *Replacing* the copyright notice to assert another one isn't 
> > appropriate,
> > though.
>
> Indeed, different copyrights may apply to different parts, but it may
> not be necessary to put it in generated files. But as a workaround,
> you might put it as a comment in the %code section.

%code is Bison specific; however, simply moving the comment into the 
regular
%{ ... %} block allows it to pass into the output.

(Side note: this is a different behavior from GNU Flex, which passes 
through
the comment even if is outside of the %{ ... %} block).

That little GNU license blurb is still a problem there. A pre-built 
y.tab.c
file could end up being packaged as a distributed file: say, for the
convenience of users who don't have a Yacc installed.

Someone's corporate license scanning tool could misidentify that file
as being GPL, and taint the whole project that way, causing some
problem for someone.

What I've done is added a sed filter to my build rule which basically
takes that notice out of the y.tab.c right after the file is
generated.

The output of Berkeley Yacc has no such thing in it, luckily.
The word "Copyright" is not to be found at all, unless it came
from the .y file, as it should be.