[antlr-interest] 2.8 update

John D. Mitchell johnm-antlr at non.net
Mon Feb 14 15:25:01 PST 2005


[Sorry for the lengthy quoting, I wanted to make sure this was in-context.]

>>>>> "Loring" == Loring Craymer <Loring.G.Craymer at jpl.nasa.gov> writes:
>>>>>> At 11:08 AM 2/14/2005, Prashant Deva wrote:

>>>> Also what all stuff goes under the Caltech/Open Channel?

>>> The grammars for rewrite and tree grammar generation, plus the classes
>>> to support tree grammar generation.

>> If the grammars make it into antlr 3 then anyone writing an ide will
>> have to incorporate that grammar in the ide to support your tree grammar
>> generation stuff. In that case they will have to use that grammar.  How
>> will that be possible if that is restricted by the Caltech/Open Channel
>> license?

> The license isn't intended to be restrictive, merely to protect the
> intellectual property rights of contributing institutions; Open Channel
> has first right if there is commercial potential, but that is potential
> payback to Open Channel for bearing the cost of maintaining the site and
> keeping legally required records of downloads.  Some (probably minor)
> negotiation would be required with the Open Channel people and myself,
> but that is pretty normal to avoid intellectual property claims against a
> commercial product.

> I do not see any real problems with incorporating my stuff into 3.0 for
> an IDE; just the usual hassles of licensing copyrighted material.

Ugh.  There's a *BIG* problem with that!  One of the core tenets of PCCTS
and Antlr has always been that it's absolutely unacceptable for Antlr and
the usage of Antlr to be held hostage.  That's why they were put into the
public domain in the first place.  That's also part of the reason why
Terence is literally writing all of the code for Antlr v3 by himself and
making all of the final decisions himself (after voluminous input from a
number of us wackos over the last 15 years or so :-).

Now, some lawyers freak out about the public domain part [gee, which part
of utterly and completely free is so hard for them to understand?], so the
Antlr v3.0 rewrite will be released under a BSD-style license.

Take care,
	John


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