[antlr-interest] licensing stuff

[Terence Parr]

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





 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/antlr-interest/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     antlr-interest-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
     http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/