RE: [Boost-users] Re: about license

Darryl Green wrote:

Cross posted from boost-users...

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-----Original Message----- From: David Abrahams [mailto:dave@boost-consulting.com] Sent: Wednesday, 25 February 2004 11:43 AM Marleny Rafferty writes:

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Hi-

I am considering using boost in my applications, but I have a question about the boost license at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt . It says (edited) "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to ... use [and] reproduce ... the Software".

It also says that any derivative works must also have the same license grant.

If my application uses boost libraries unchanged, is it considered a derivative work?

Yes.

Really? The ligitimacy of this stance seems questionable (but ianal etc). Further I did not see it as being part of the objectives for the license. Quite the opposite in fact.

(Disclaimer: IANAL, and any reputable lawyer would take plenty of time to provide you with considered advice.) My understanding is that executable or object code is a derivative work of all the source code that it is built from. So any executable that uses a library is a derivative work of that library. (There is a question as to whether this applies to header files that only define named constants and structure layouts, but little question that it applies to inline and statically-linked function definitions. The FSF asserts that using dynamically-linked function definitions also creates a derivative work.) Your source code, however, does not become a derivative work of a library that it depends on, unless you copy part or all of the library's source code into it.