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

[Ric Klaren]

Hi,

Bah another license discussion :/

Please people stop theorizing until Ter wakes up ;) Reread the previous
discussion on licenses in the archives and you'll know what is planned for
next releases.

That said. I guess that the major contributors to antlr can be counted on 2
hands. I guess that it is possible to get a hold of most of them as well.
So getting a contributor list and/or retargetting the lot to BSD/Artistic
(which was the plan for ANTLR 3 if I recall right) after talking with the
main contributors should probably be doable. GPL is not an issue anyway
since its going against Terence's intentions.

A question that remains is how much should someone contribute to be
considered 'able to sue'... Yeah I got them to fix that typo in the docs so
pay up!! Yeah right... Life is easier without lawyers.

Another thing: people contributing to antlr would have seen these nice
license banners at the top of the source/docs etc. I guess any sane person
submitting patches etc. would expect it to be placed under that license.
And if they did not like that license they would not have contributed the
patches anyway.

On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 11:50:49PM -0800, Addi Jamshidi wrote:
> 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.

Aside note. Going on the domains some people have been sending mail from
I'd say that quite a lot of quite big companies are already using antlr ;)

> 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).

I guess productizing will give only much more trouble than getting hold of
the main contributors and relicensing to BSD/Artistic. 

> 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.

On another note... In 6 months you can recode the support library under
another license, tweak the codegenerator for it if necessary or plug a new
codegenerator (which you will own) in antlr, ship the product without antlr
itself and your own support lib. The generated code should not be a problem
then.

To say the least any capable developer should be able to do that in 1
month. Safes you the expense of 5 months labour...

Cheers,

Ric
-- 
-----+++++*****************************************************+++++++++-------
    ---- Ric Klaren ----- j.klaren at utwente.nl ----- +31 53 4893722  ----
-----+++++*****************************************************+++++++++-------
  "Good judgement comes from experience.
     Experience comes from bad judgement." --- Unknown


 
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