Re: Help with legal audit (yes - this is directed to boost!)

From: Dave Gomboc (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-11-29 17:17:07

> > I and millions of other Canadians, British, Australians, and other
> > English-speaking peoples would take it as a kindness if it could be
> > remembered that the spelling of "licence" varies between
> > jurisdictions.
>
> Granted, but what would you suggest here?

With regards to the licence issue as a whole, I suggest that Boost _not_
permit separate licences for individual components of Boost.  This
single step would make it significantly easier for legal departments to
vet the use of Boost.  Many parts of Boost are intended for
standardisation, so a licence that allows the widest possible use with
the minimum possible requirements would be best.  The words "public
domain" come to mind, but if there is a reason to not enter Boost into
the public domain, then a BSD-style licence would be good.  That's for
two reasons: a) with that licence, what can be done with the code is
quite open; b) the licence has already existed for some time already and
is likely to already be familiar to many companies.

I understand that it would be some work to reach the individual authors
of Boost components and get them to accept a unified licence, but it's
best for Boost authors to do this once rather than to have thousands of
corporate legal departments examining every file for licence
restrictions and assessing the compatibility of the conglomeration with
their needs.  It's my (naive?) hope that none of the authors would come
back with a "OMDB" response.

With regards to multiple spellings, I unfortunately don't have any great
suggestions.  It is possible to ask language authors who introduce
keywords like "synchronize" to also introduce the synonym keyword
"synchronise" to mean exactly the same thing.  But in real life,
developer code also suffers from this problem -- I think that a general
name aliasing facility in the language would be needed to resolve it,
which would be pretty darn heavyweight.  Mind you, if it could allow
multi-lingual software development, where each person could code in
their own language, that would be cool.  Okay, I'll stop wasting Boost's
time with my dreams... ;-)

Dave Gomboc