[antlr-interest] The matter of licensing...

[Addi Jamshidi]

Dear friends:
 
I just wanted to raise something that has regretfully come to play a major role in our usage of ANTLR. 
 
I work for a large corporation developing one of company's many software products. As part of the development, I needed a parser and for that I turned to ANTLR. After almost 6 months of hard work the parser was finished (thanks to ANTLR) and constituted the foundation for a number of core features for our product. We are now at a stage where we are ready to release the product, and as such and as is the case the corporate lawyers are going through every 3rd party component that has been used thus making sure there are no issues with licensing, etc.,, etc. etc.. And regretfully we have been told that we can not ship our product due to lack of proper licensing from ANTLR. In other words our product is on hold!
 
The issue is rather simple in terms of legalities but complex in the eyes of us as developers! Basically the issue is that ANTLR licensing does not explicitly state that those who have contributed (or will contribute)  to ANTLR can not claim anything financially or otherwise in any form or shape now or anytime in the future (i.e. standard open source licensing). The legal thinking is that anyone who has contributed to ANTLR can in effect claim monetary rewards from any company that uses the ANTLR parser (and its runtime library) in its product(s). Understandably comapnies (especially large corporations) can not (and in fact will not) be able to use the product for their own protections.
 
Hence because of not having a genuine "open source" licensing agreement, ANTLR remains (to us) as nothing but an academic experiemental project at best (despite its absolute uniquness in offering the industry something pf sp much value that can impact so many businesses and lives for the better).
 
As a developer my argue has been to please either turn the licensing into a genuine "open source"  standard agreement (as done for example for Linux, or MySQL, etc.), OR productize it so it will be available comercially to anyone who wants to use it (given of course the proper commercial licensing).
 
As it stands and regretfully we have to throw out 6 months of hard work and start from fresh seeking other alternatives to using ANTLR.
 
Sincerely,
 
Addi Jamshidi  


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