[antlr-interest] 2.8 update

[Loring Craymer]

At 03:25 PM 2/14/2005, John D. Mitchell wrote:
...
> > 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.

"Public domain" became a very grey area when the current copyright laws 
went into effect.  Now stuff is implicitly copyrighted.  From what I have 
read (I am not a lawyer), authors are protected against being able to put 
their work in the public domain.  You can transfer copyrights by notifying 
the copyright office in writing, but it is not clear that that applies to 
transferring copyrighted works into the public domain.  Right now, we can 
be sure that ANTLR will be public domain 70 years after the death of all 
contributors; whether it is or is not right now is another question.  Only 
the courts can say for sure.

--Loring


>Take care,
>         John