RE: [boost] Commercial use of Boost?

From: Jon Kalb (jonkalb_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-10-03 17:27:50

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Fernando Cacciola [mailto:fcacciola_at_[hidden]] 
> Subject: RE: [boost] Commercial use of Boost?

> 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.

And what would be wrong with that? 
 
> The above example is silly because nobody would pay for it, 

Having the entire distribution available to me in a read-only form when
it isn't convenient for me to be on-line sounds appealing to me. Perhaps
I wouldn't pay much for it, but I don't personally have CD burner and I
think it would be worth something to me. Why would we want to discourage
someone from trying to add value in this way?

> 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.

Why should Boost care what you charge for your effort?

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

If these are the only two choices, then you are paranoid. ;)