Vladimir Prus <ghost@cs.msu.su> writes:
David Abrahams wrote:
Vladimir Prus <ghost@cs.msu.su> writes:
Could you clarify? To be exactly specific, if I have a file with the following content, as a part of Boost.Build test:
int main() { return 0; }
why does it need copyright?
Files without copyrights make corporate lawyers nervous, and that's a barrier to adoption. If everything in Boost is copyrighted, there won't be any problem with dropping a Boost release on a corporate server.
*Any* file without copyright? What about 'boost.css' or 'c++boost.gif' for example? What about BoostBook DTD, which has the following:
Copyright (c) 2002 by Peter Simons <simons@computer.org>. All Rights Reserved.
Obviously there are some files whose copyright/license can't be changed.
What about tools/regression/xsl_reports/merger/__init__.py
And, for a completely interesting question, whose copyright should be on 'status/explicit-failures-markup.xml'? Of all the authors?
The reason I'm asking all this is that it seems that a lot effort was already spend to add copyrights, and more is likely to be spend and I find it hard to believe that lawyers will examine every single file of Boost. Maybe, just headers and the code which goes into compiled libraries really need to be license-clean.
The more things we can easily license/copyright, the fewer questions the lawyers will have. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com