On Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:58:48 +0200, Gennaro Prota wrote:

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

...

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

With a terminology stress which (to me) twists the meaning of "free software" it could be classified as "non-copylefted free software" (which basically means, anyone can redistribute it under a non free license; in the case of boost they can do that only if they don't redistribute the source code) -- [ Gennaro Prota, C++ developer for hire ]

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:

...

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

...

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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Gennaro Prota wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006 19:46:10 +0200, Markus Schöpflin wrote:

...

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?

Hi Markus,

not sure whether you replied after or before my auto-followup :-) In any case, yes, it allows all four freedoms and thus qualify, by definition. However it also allows the freedom to "remove freedom" on a specific derivative work: it is non-copylefted free software.

Before, but with a non-subscribed mail address, so it took some iterations on my side and moderator approval to get the reply to the ML. :-) Anyway, you are of course right by saying that boost qualifies as non-copylefted free software. If this is more or less than just free software is a philosophical question. I was just mystified by your original comment claiming that boost is *not* free.

This can be seen as "it gives more freedom", as Brian suggests, or "it doesn't preserve freedom", according to one's one beliefs and/or logic. As a matter of fact, that allows cases such as X11, which has non-free versions being the only ones that work on some hardware (making it non-free for users of that hardware).

Yes, but it also allows for cases where (like in our case) we are using boost in commercial closed source products without too much legal hassle. This would have never been possible if boost was copylefted. The benefit for the community in this case is that boost is regression tested on a more exotic platform (Tru64/cxx/gcc) on a regular base. This may be a bit exaggerated, but when boost would be copylefted, there possibly would be no up to date support for Tru64. Markus PS: Someone recently posted a link to an excellent article regarding these issues to the boost developer mailing list. See http://www.ipinfoblog.com/archives/Open%20Source%20Legal%20Issues.pdf

Markus Schöpflin wrote:

See http://www.crystalclearsoftware.com/cgi-bin/boost_wiki/wiki.pl?Boost_License....

And most probably no-one has been found so far which either qualifies to do the required analysis or pay someone who is qualified.

Thanks. I'm not really concerned about the philosophical arguments, just collecting info before I submit a request to the IBM lawyers to try to get approval to use Boost.