On Tuesday 08 October 2002 07:14 pm, Brian Neal wrote:

I hope this is appropriate for this mailing list...

Absolutely.

2) Should there be (is there?) a central boost license that all boost libraries have that we can point our lawyers at, instead of going to each and every boost developer to get permission to use his/her library?

There is no central Boost license. There are, however, license requirements as stated here: http://www.boost.org/more/lib_guide.htm#License Each Boost library has its own license that _must_ meet those requirements. Of course, that won't satisfy the lawyers, so you'll probably have to send them the individual library licenses for approval. We really could do much better in this area: at the very least, we could provide a comprehensive list of the licenses for each library. Doug

I hope this is appropriate for this mailing list...

I am a software engineer and our development team loves boost. However, I can already see a coming battle with our company lawyers trying to convince them to let us use boost in our software. We informally talked with one of our software quality engineers. He said their major concern would be assuring that we had permission to use the boost software. In other words, how would we know that the boost developers had permission to release

At 07:14 PM 10/8/2002, Brian Neal wrote: their

libraries so that anyone could use it? He also thought we would need something in writing to this effect. Since their isn't any official boost organization, I am getting scared already.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but I would like to hear from any boost developer or user who has experiences in dealing with this nonsense.

I've dealt with it several times now. Two or three of the biggest software companies in the world have contacted me when they started to use Boost code. While their lawyers asked a few questions, and one even made a suggestion or two to improve our license policy, they basically lost interest pretty quickly and okayed Boost use. The "how would we know that the boost developers had permission to release..." question did come up once. I just said that they had no assurance that Boost developers owned the code they claimed copyright on, just as they had no assurance that any other material they used (from their programmers, their suppliers, etc) was actually original, except in the (nonexistant) cases where the company lawyer had watched the code being written. And that given the prodigious memory some programmers have for code, even watching wasn't really good enough. That probably wasn't a very good argument, but the lawyer did seem to understand it and stopped complaining. --Beman