Re: gperf output licensing

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

James Hook asked:
> Is the source code output of the gperf utility covered by GPL?

The general guideline for this question is: Does of output contain
significant portions of the source code of the tool? Only then is the
output considered as a "derivative work" of the tool.

In the case of gperf, the output contains only small pieces of a few lines,
such as:

  #ifdef __GNUC__
  __inline
  #else
  #ifdef __cplusplus
  inline
  #endif
  #endif

These pieces are too small for being significant.

Therefore the conclusion is that GPERF's output is not a derivative work
of GPERF, and therefore can be used without restrictions.

Bruno