RE: Corporate legal department reaction to Boost license

From: Mat Marcus (mmarcus_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-11-14 00:46:23

Please remember that in a corporate setting individuals wishing to 
use boost in their product or its SDK must solve a number of 
problems, not all of them technical. Reuse is often a driven by a 
bottom up, grass roots effort. Engineers must solve technical 
problems, educate peers and management, and address the "not invented 
here" syndrome. Reuse efforts can easily be derailed; obtaining 
approval from the legal department can be a major hurdle. It may seem 
like large corporations would have sufficient legal resources to 
examine multiple licenses. This might be true if reuse was a 
corporate wide initiative. But, for bottom up efforts, legal 
resources can be scarce. Besides the problem concerning the number of 
licenses, some legal departments also have problems with the license 
in some of the libraries that requires boost related copyright 
notices to appear in 'user documentation'. As I see it the goal is to 
encourage as many programmers as possible to use the boost libraries. 
At least some programmers are only seeking more uniformity from the 
licenses. This is not a radical change or some kind of watering down.

--Mat