On Mon, 23 Aug 2004, Florian Stoehr wrote:

> netbsd comes with "flex". hm, is this gnu software?

It is maintained and provided from the GNU project. Nevertheless, the
README says:

  Note that flex is distributed under a copyright very similar to that of
  BSD Unix, and not under the GNU General Public License (GPL) ...

The COPYING document shows the BSD-style license. Plus it says:

  This basically says "do whatever you please with this software except
  remove this notice or take advantage of the University's (or the flex
  authors') name".

> i'm working on a commercial product (not open source), so can i use the
> flex that comes with netbsd to generate the .c file?

It is fine.

Have a look at the COPYING file. It also says:

  Note that the "flex.skl" scanner skeleton carries no copyright notice.
  You are free to do whatever you please with scanners generated using flex;
  for them, you are not even bound by the above copyright.

 Jeremy C. Reed

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