RE: [boost] Commercial use of Boost?

From: Fernando Cacciola (fcacciola_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-10-03 17:01:22

BTW, this issue reminded me about the following:

The copyright notice in the boost headers reads:

"Permission to copy, use,
modify, sell and distribute this software is granted provided this
copyright notice appears in all copies."

I wonder how the term 'sell' should be interpreted.
For instance, I could put a boost distribution in a CD and actually 'sell'
it, as if it were a commercial product in itself.

The above example is silly because nobody would pay for it, but you should
get the idea.
A better example could be that I might write a library, to, say, perform
text processing, which would be just a thin wrapper around regexp (and other
boost stuff).
I might sell that library at a substancial price with the excuse that it
support regular expressions extensively, it's thread-safe, portable and
comes with source code. But all that would be true because of the boost
"kernel" and not because of my code.

I've noticed that this is the typical copyright of a free source code
library.

What do you thing? Should we change the text or I am being too paranoic?

Fernando Cacciola
Sierra s.r.l.
fcacciola_at_[hidden]
www.gosierra.com