El 18/06/2024 a las 15:23, Phil Endecott via Boost escribió:
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I continue to find the "terms of use" page problematic. If you want to have a "legally binding agreement" between you and casual site visitors, then at the very least that needs to be a full-screen popup that everyone has to see and click "agree" on before they can view the site. Content in a link at the bottom of the page that the user hasn't clicked on cannot possibly establish a contract.
You say that "this website ... provided under the terms of the Boost Software License". Is that in addition to these terms of use? I.e. if I disagree with the terms of use, can I choose to use it under the terms of the BSL instead? If that's not what you mean - then what does that bit mean?
IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH ALL OF THESE LEGAL TERMS, THEN YOU ARE EXPRESSLY PROHIBITED FROM USING THE SERVICES AND YOU MUST DISCONTINUE USE IMMEDIATELY.
Noted.
Hi Phil, thanks for your feedback, this is a discussion of the points you raised: Legally binding agreement As a matter of fact, using a service implies abiding by its terms of use via the so-called "implicit consent" provision. Let me give you an example that is similar in some respects to ours: wikipedia.org. There are three types of users there: * Read-only users (the majority): these can access the site without explicitily accepting the terms of use, yet these terms exist: https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Terms_of_Use * Non-registered contributing users: one can for instance initiate a talk on some article without registering. Right at the bottom of the "Add topic" button there is some legalese explaining that clicking that button implies accepting the terms of use. * Registered users: these provide an (optional) email address, go through the usual validation mail etc. Curiously enough, explicit acceptance of the terms of use is not required anywhere in the process. Now, in the (proposed) new Boost website we have two types of users: * Non-registered users: these are expected to be the majority, at least initially. Non-registered users have effectively read-only access to the site, so the terms for them are extremely lenient in that they focus on scenarios beyond their interaction capabilities. In this case, we have opted for doing as Wikipedia (and others) do, and provide the terms of use without requiring explicit consent. * Registered users: these can interact with the site by providing personal information in their profile section and proposing entries to the news section (in the future, their interaction capabilities will expand). Currently they are not requested to accept the terms of use as part of their registation, but I filed a ticket so that this is fixed. ----- "If you do not agree with all of these legal terms, you are expressely prohibited..." For its own protection and that of other users, any service provider must be able to deny (or at least prohibit) access to malicious users (like, for instance, those posting illegal content), so, yes, this must be present. Again, non-registered users can hardly break the terms of use because they can only read information. Anyway, the message is a bit hostile and I've toned it down a bit following the example of usingstdcpp.org (see below). ----- Terms of use and licensing terms These are separate topics. There are different components to be discussed here: * The site itself, i.e. a web server and associated infrastructure run by the service provider. * The information displayed by the site: * Text and images on the site itself (BSL licensed, repo boostorg/website-v2). * Documents on the "Learn" section (BSL licensed, repo boostorg/website-v2-docs). * Documentation from Boost libraries (BSL licensed, each on its own repo). * Links to Boost source code (BSL licensed, each on its own repo). * Links to external sites * Content contributed by users (e.g. news entries). These are hosted on the site backend. * The source code of the site (BSL licensed, repo boostorg/website-v2). Now, the terms of use refer to what users are allowed to do when interacting with the site. All the content they access (trough the site or some other way) is subject to its corresponding license that governs what users can do with it (copying, distributing, modifying, etc.) So, fo instance, a user can enter the site (and implicitly accept the terms of use), download some docs (which are BSL), stop using the service (thus not being bound by the terms of use any longer) and use the downloaded content as they please (subject to the corresponding license). I hope this clarifies the situation. There's a category of information without an explicitly assigned license, namely "Content contributed by users". For this we are requiring (by virtue of their mere posting) that we are granted a license to copy, distribute the content , etc. --otherwise we couldn't even show the contribution on the site. I've reworded some sections of the Terms of Use so that the points you raised are hopefully more clear: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16SNasomozyvBosnv6K5Ufe2_3-3cyrlw0m6fDtRc... It'd be great if you (and others) can take a look and report back. Best, Joaquín M López Muñoz