Preferred form

Preferred form

My impression from the story is that the BISON source is in fact the preferred form for making most changes to this code, and the original author's method for making changes was to change the BISON source, compile it to elisp, then hand-edit the elisp.

If not, I doubt he would have bothered to respond to the complaint by distributing the BISON source and a program that automates the hand-edits.

I think people understand the idea that sometimes source code was originally generated from some other input file, but is nonetheless the source code -- the preferred form for making changes -- after that.

We haven't seen much controversy over preferred form, but I assume if there ever is any, the methods that the alleged copyright infringer uses himself to modify the code would figure strongly into deciding the issue.