13 Apr
2017
13 Apr
'17
10:01 a.m.
On 04/13/17 01:55, Niall Douglas via Boost wrote:
The biggest objection I always heard from Legal(s) was patent threat, and the BSL says absolutely zero about patents.
You may notice all the v2.0 revisions of major open source licences do now say something about patents. That's why.
Having a section regarding patents in the license implies that the author is supposed to perform a research on possible patent infringement. Otherwise he might be giving a license to patents he doesn't own. I'd say most of the Boost contributors don't have the resources or will to conduct such research, so this task is upon users (more presicely, those users who act in jurisdictions that recognize software patents). Pretty much the same goes for trademarks.