[antlr-interest] ANTLR Rights and Open Source issues

lgcraymer lgc at mail1.jpl.nasa.gov
Tue Jan 22 12:04:35 PST 2002


I've finished my tree grammar generator extension to ANTLR and Ter
and I have been talking about getting that and the tree rewrite 
support into a 2.8 release, possibly along with a code 
generator-generator module that Ter has been thinking about.  I'll
say more about this in a separate message.

The problem that Ter and I are grappling with at the moment is the 
release conditions.  JPL has a fairly liberal Open Source policy, but 
will not release into the public domain (no legal protection against 
liability claims, and no desire to waive copyright protection). Ter's 
view, which I tend to agree with, is that Open Source should be "open 
source" and usable without restriction (except possibly to give
proper credit to developers) in commercial products.  Thus the "ANTLR
Rights" manifesto to be found on the antlr.org site.

Ter is willing to put ANTLR under Open Source license, provided that
1.)  it doesn't add to the hassles of distributing ANTLR, and
2.)  it doesn't compromise the intent of the "Rights" declaration.

The GNU licenses do not support the intent of the "Rights" 
declaration.  Can anyone point us to a good alternative license which 
preserves the "Rights" intent?  Also, does anyone else have comments 
on the general release policy?

Help!

--Loring


 

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