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using YACC to generate commercial products - AT&T speaks
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tekmdp!laurir
Feb 13, 1983, 2:24:41 AM2/13/83
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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)
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)
csu-cs!bentson
Feb 21, 1983, 3:41:35 AM2/21/83
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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.
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
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