On 09/04/2017 23:20, Mathias Gaunard via Boost wrote:
That is correct, IANAL, but my understanding is that French law does not allow transfer of ownership of intellectual property, and that it stays with the author until death.
Moral rights cannot be transferred in many European countries, but economic rights can be. One can also sign a contract binding you to never assert your moral rights. The end result looks very similar to outright sale or transfer of IP as under English law.
In any case, I am listed as one of the main authors in legally-binding registrations of various pieces of software managed by the University of Paris-Sud, including NT2 on which this library is based on, and would have to give my agreement for any special licensing deal. This is mostly a technicality, as all of this is licensed under the Boost Software License and there are little damages to speak of, but still something that needs fixing.
One of the big problems with the older open source licences such as the Boost licence was a lack of awareness at the time of writing of different copyright regimes outside the English law ones. Newer open source licences are much better designed in this regard, and the EU in 2009 published the EUPL licence specifically designed for maximum global compatibility. (Incidentally I really wish US-centric open source orgs would use something like the EUPL https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/eupl1.1.-licence-en_0.pdf rather than their US-centric licences which are problematic outside English law jurisdictions) One might think that a lawyer in a European country could assert that due to the impermeability of moral rights, that the failure to comply with the Boost licence requirement of preservation of copyright notices is a problem, but that would only be in countries where moral rights are impermeable. The argument wouldn't fly in the US or the UK, except when applied to visual artwork. However, in Europe legal precedent holds that licences cannot impose conditions on a sale of software, where "sale" is defined to be any distribution such as a download. So as soon as a European downloads an open source library, they are free to ignore any conditions in any licence. This is probably surprising to most readers on here as it makes licences such as the GPL unenforceable in the EU, see http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=91b10f02-8ae0-4e2d-bd20-4bba0e.... Obviously this is a recent (2013) ruling to a specific case, but it was by the EU supreme court, so any further legal cases would likely be decided the same way. So, and stressing IANAL, I think Numscale are on solid legal ground here, at least both in the US and Europe. As a spinout from a university, I think it would be extremely unlikely that the university's legal department haven't gone through the situation with a fine tooth comb beforehand. tl;dr; I see no problem with Boost.SIMD's IP provenance. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/