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That was my immediate assumption too, but part of the compiler's output is going to be some kind of a runtime library. If that itself is GPL 3 and the code generated by the compiler statically links to it, then I'm pretty sure a case could be made that the compiler's output is a derivitive work. Kind of sneaky and non intuitive, though.

This is all way out of my area of expertise, so take it with a grain of salt.

At a very quick glance, I think he's using libpython as the run-time library. However, there is probably some code that would propagate the license, so careful attention needs to be paid there.

This issue is why bison's license contains a special exception for the part(s) of itself it includes in its output. http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Condition...

GCC has a runtime exception for exactly this reason.

Couldn't you construct such a license?