Re: [Boost-users] [license] Why is the Boost license not an official Open Source

With the aid of my attorney, I studied this issue very carefully about 2 years ago. He came to the conclusion that the Boost License was, and I quote "perhaps the most open software license that one could imagine" and he went on to say that the only way you could have a more open license would be to "have no license at all". Now, I'm not going to study this issue again, but if nothing substantive has changed in the license, I suspect that what just stated still holds today. Now, as always concerning legal matters, your mileage may vary...but this is what I found when I carefully looked at the issue.

From: Markus Schöpflin Reply-To: boost-users@lists.boost.org To: boost-users@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [Boost-users] [license] Why is the Boost license not an official Open Source license? Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 19:46:10 +0200

Gennaro Prota schrieb:

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On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 16:43:36 -0700 (PDT), Cromwell Enage wrote:

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IIRC a submittal was sent a while back (maybe almost a year ago). No word on whether the submittal even got to its destination. However, the Free Software Foundation does list the BSL as a GPL-compatible license. (See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.)

Which doesn't mean much, to be honest. I'd like to state clearly that boost is *not* free software, just open source (modulo opensource.org confirming that).

Huh, boost is not free software? AFAICT, the license allows all the four freedoms. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for a list of those. So why should boost not fall into the category of free software?

Markus

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