[vox-tech] flex/bison and licenses

[Samuel Merritt]

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On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 12:23:04AM -0800, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> hi all,
>=20
> flex is licensed under BSD (basically).   bison is licensed under GPL.
>=20
> do programs that get distributed and which use flex/bison as part of
> their make process have to be licensed GPL?
>=20
> can i use flex and bison to generate a .c file which will be compiled
> and linked into my ultra-proprietary very-non-free software?

The only reason why you might not be able to is that bison includes
parts of itself in the generated source.=20

I don't know about your version of bison, but in
/usr/share/doc/bison.simple (Debian stable), there's the following:=20

/* 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.  */

So, it looks like you can do whatever you want with the generated code.=20
=20
> pete
>=20
> --=20
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Samuel Merritt
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