[antlr-interest] licensing stuff

[Addi Jamshidi]

Thank you Terence for your note.
 
Regretfully the big corporations (or at least their lawyers) do not see the same things as us developers and programmers do. As programmers we love to help one another (that is in our nature and just like an innocent child we take and give things as were are given and as we are asked to give). However the real world regretfully finds this innocence as part of a big conspiracy to screw the big corporations. The very same corporations whose programmers and developers belong to the same innocent community! I guess some have a hard to believe that there are still people out there (such as yourself and all those who have contributed to the ANTLR community) who do things just so they can do a good deed and that there is nothing selfish for personal gains associated with it!
 
In any event, in our case we have used the C# version of ANTLR (not Java), and hence things are a bit more complicated when it comes to the licensing agreement (something which we did fail to convince our lawyers that "its cool and its ok to use ANTLR and distribute it freely")!
 
Warmest regards,


Terence Parr <parrt at cs.usfca.edu> wrote:
Howdy. My intention has always been to publish work without 
restrictions of any kind so that nobody has to talk to a lawyer to use 
my work. That was 15 years ago. Now, some people won't use my 
software BECAUSE it has no restriction! Kinda cracks me up. I'm being 
punished for my generosity. There have been a HUGE number of incoming 
patches over 15 years and it's too late to get formal emails from all 
of them. Some are surely retired persons and off email like Knuth ;) 
Programmers understand what public domain means and they don't expect 
any compensation for patches.

Anyway, I get email regularly from lawyers at IBM and other big places 
that are used to suing everyone (a pox on their families). They then 
worry that they will be sued by everyone. This is a fact I cannot 
change. Lawyers don't get that software patents and all the related 
heinousness is anathema to the anarchistic cooperative programming 
community (just my opinion, btw). Programmers love to help each other; 
look at jGuru and the ilk. When was the last time a lawyer helped out 
another one for free?

ANTLR 3.0 will be BSD license, however, this won't prevent issues 
raised in this thread: that contributors will come after users of the 
software for compensation. BSD says "do what you want, but don't sue 
me". Does this cover contributors? I doubt it; only the original 
author is covered. Do we need to modify it to say "any contributions 
acquire automatically the BSD license?" Probably not since some lawyer 
will simply argue that that is not legal or some crap.

Anyway, there is no good solution. The more we tighten up BSD or some 
other license, the more it will become necessary to consult the devil 
to use the software! I hate this issue. :( I've been wondering how to 
build a formal contributors list for 3.0 and perhaps we can add wording 
explicitly transferring ownership to me so that I can say I don't own 
it. Bizarre. After these sorts of discussions, it makes me want to do 
every line of code myself for 3.0.

A final note: people, please check the "license" on software before you 
use it. I had to carefully read licenses for using Lucene, Resin, 
etc... when building jGuru. Do it *before*, not *after*.

Thanks for your time and thanks for using ANTLR even though we're all 
going to be sued :(

Regards,
Terence
--
Professor Comp. Sci., University of San Francisco
Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
Co-founder, http://www.jguru.com
Co-founder, http://www.knowspam.net enjoy email again!
Co-founder, http://www.peerscope.com pure link sharing






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