[antlr-interest] ANTLR 3 License

[Anthony W Youngman]

Everybody else has said "yes", but can I throw a spanner in the works?

I'd much prefer LGPL. The only real "advantage" of BSD is that it allows
other people to take advantage of your work, make money from it, and
"improve" or otherwise tamper with it "in secret".

The LGPL will mean that if they want to do that, they have to keep Antlr
identifiably separate and publish any changes they have made to Antlr
itself. If you go down the LGPL route, though, you really need to make
explicit the fact that any code generated by Antlr is *not* covered by
the Antlr licence.

The other advantage of the LGPL is that you should ask anybody providing
a "substantive patch" or more to assign copyright to you. If a condition
of that assignment is that any Antlr containing that code will be
available under the LGPL, it then allows you (Ter) to licence Antlr to
any company that wants to make money such that you get some money to
feed back into Antlr too.

This isn't an unusual approach - to name various companies that do it,
we have MySQL, TT with KDE, and even Cygnus (part of RedHat) with gcc
(except they all use the GPL).

Cheers,
Wol

-----Original Message-----
From: Terence Parr [mailto:parrt at cs.usfca.edu] 
Sent: 16 July 2003 23:40
To: antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [antlr-interest] ANTLR 3 License



On Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 02:19 PM, ngormley1974 wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Ter, have you had any thoughts about ANTLR 3 licensing?

Yep.  Lots. I"m thinking essentially the BSD license.  You can do what 
you want with it, just don't sue me. ;)

>
> I use ANTLR for commerical and non-commercial projects, and wouldn't
> mind knowing whats around that particular corner.

Will BSD work for you (and anybody else)?

Ter
--
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