Re: bison.hairy and skeleton licenses?

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:

> 1) bison.hairy seems to have no copyright statement at all (unlike
>    bison.simple).  I gather bison.{hairy,simple} are no longer
>    installed, so maybe this is moot.

Yes, that's right.

>    On the other hand, maybe it should be reinstalled just to fix the
>    license, even if current bison doesn't use it, since I'm sure
>    some installations still use it.

I don't see how this could be done reliably.  We'd have to know which
version of bison.hairy is installed, and where it is installed, and
we'd need to handle the case where the installed bison.hairy has
private patches.  Sounds like more trouble than it's worth.  The
various installers and distributors can handle this problem, much as
they handle other copyright bugs in old software.

> 2) the new skeletons (lalr1.c, glr.c, yacc.c) have only the standard
>    GPL.  Do they need a "special exception" a la bison.simple?  (Below.)

No, the special exception applies only when Bison uses a yacc.c that
is distributed by the FSF.  Otherwise, the GPL terms operate as usual.