Re: Question about "Conditions for Using Bison" in Bison 2.0 documentation

[Paul Eggert]

Hans Aberg <address@hidden> writes:

> the output of a copyrighted program is rarely viewed as being
> covered by the copyright of the program that made it.

No, actually it's quite common.  For example, if I run the traditional
/usr/ccs/bin/yacc that is shipped with Solaris 9, the output file
y.tab.c contains the following lines:

/*
 * Copyright (c) 1993 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
 */

There is no other wording granting permission to copy, so under the
Berne convention you have no right to copy the output file y.tab.c
unless you have some other agreement with Sun.

I suspect that the only reason this "works" is that Sun and its users
are relatively sloppy about copyright issues, and they don't really
care about crossing all the Ts and dotting all the Is.  The GNU
project tends to be pickier (following the usual rule of thumb that
the less money you have, the more careful you have to be about the law
:-).