laurir (02/12/83)
Long time followers of this news group may recall that last April I queried as to the legality of using YACC to generate a compiler which would then be sold to customers who do not necessarily have Unix licenses. The problem is that YACC includes a 150-line file, /usr/lib/yaccpar, in the generated compiler, and so one might construe the result to be "derived" from Unix in the sense of the copyright act and/or the Unix license. I heard today from the AT&T licensing folks, and they do in fact consider output from YACC to be part of Unix. There is at least one company making its money by selling such a compiler; they run the C code from yacc through a cross compiler to get a compiler for a machine which cannot run Unix. The implication then is that a Unix binary license must be purchased for this non-Unix machine before the generated compiler can be run on it. -- Andrew Klossner (decvax!tektronix!tekmdp!laurir)
bentson (02/17/83)
If someone is serious about using YACC for commercial products, I'd suggest getting a copy of the "dragon book" (Principles of Compiler Design by Aho and Ullman) and honestly writing the program to use the tables without cribbing from the included Bell stuff. I doubt that they (Ma and friends) could get you for using only the tables that come out of YACC. Randy Bentson Colo State U - Comp Sci
wapd (02/18/83)
Is it true that the prohibition would be against including the YACC-generated software in a product for sale ? In other words, what would stop someone from doing development using YACC, generating the table and then rewriting an (almost) identical one by hand ? Bill Dietrich houxj!wapd