RE: [boost] Request for license review

From: Noah Stein (noah_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-11-15 20:07:48

-----Original Message-----
From: wb_at_[hidden] [mailto:wb_at_[hidden]]
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 3:49 PM
To: boost_at_[hidden]
Subject: [boost] Request for license review

My employer, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has for years made
its software available under a licensing program known locally as
Fermitools.  The most recent legal details of this are available at
    http://fermitools.fnal.gov/about/terms.html

-----------------------------------

For my products (video games), I'm not sure how to interpret the following
lines in the license document:

*Any redistribution and/or modification of the software shall be accompanied
by this README file.

*The User shall acknowledge the origin of the software as set forth below:

"This work was performed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, operated
by Universities Research Association, Inc., under contract DE-AC02-76CH03000
with the U.S. Department of Energy."

If I use your libraries in one of my games, how am I supposed to comply with
the two points?  I'm sure embedded systems guys understand my concern.  On
some machines, I don't have a file system, so how can I include a README?
Even if I included the README distributed with a source code library, what
purpose would it serve for the end user because I'm not shipping the source
as such?   Or is a compiled version of source considered neither ther
"software" itself or a "modification" thereof.  Where do I acknowledge
Fermi?  In a video game, do I put it on the media, the box, in the manual,
or on some credit screen in the game?

I realize that most people using boost are not video games guys, but as I
said above, I think the embedded guys have a similar view.  Other than that,
as a person who is a programmer and not a lawyer, I didn't have any
questions or issues with the license.

-- Noah