[jimwise]

In fairness, this is stretching the meaning of `binary blobs' a little, right?

I may be misreading, but the issue is that some of the elisp sources of CEDET were generated from bison input files automatically at some point -- but they're still elisp sources; a user can still modify them if needed, and if an asteroid hits the house of whoever did the original conversion, development can still continue that way.

That doesn't mean that _technically_ we wouldn't be a lot better off if the bison sources made it into the next emacs release, for completeness and ease of future development -- but I'm not sure I see the GPL violation here.

[wbhart]

No, this is not stretching the definition at all. There is no way to recreate the source of the parser generator from the automatically generated parser and grammar files. And in fact it would be entirely non-trivial to recreate it.

The parser also likely contains large tables of values autogenerated by the parser generator (though I didn't check this). There is no way the average developer could modify the parser to suit their needs. This would be even more difficult than disassembling a binary and altering the assembly language.

In a way I am glad this happened. After a months long ordeal some years ago involving strongly worded letters with threatening legal language due to an accidental violation of the GPL (which I simply don't use for new projects any more) I now have an uncontentious example that I can point people to which shows that even developers with the best of intentions make "serious" accidental mistakes!

[dmm]

The language of the GPL says the source code is the "Preferred form for modification", it doesn't specifically mention binary blobs.

[sixtofour]

"In fairness, this is stretching the meaning of `binary blobs' a little, right?"

Stallman doesn't seem to think so, he labels it serious and calls for immediate correction.