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

From: williamkempf_at_[hidden]
Date: 2001-11-29 17:30:41

--- In boost_at_y..., "Dave Gomboc" <dave_at_c...> wrote:
> > > 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.

As long as you understand that you're not answering my question but 
instead are changing the subject here...

>  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.

First, I agree that it would be of benefit to most if we had a single 
Boost license used by all.  That's *sort of* the goal of suggesting 
a "standard" Boost license.  However, requiring all libraries, 
current and future, to adhere to this license is not likely to be 
something that Boost can do.  It will assuredly scare away some 
contributers, after all the current restrictions on what can be 
placed in a license has already caused heart burn for several people 
in the past.  Not giving them any wiggle room at all would likely 
cause some to simply not contribute.  This point has been discussed a 
lot on this list before.

BTW, the BSD license has been rejected in the past.
 
> 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... ;-)

Here you almost got back to answering my question, though you took it 
much further then appropriate ;).  It's not really possible to 
have "aliases" here.  We have to pick a single name.  Either we 
settle on one spelling of license, or we chose a name that doesn't 
have different cultural spellings.

Bill Kempf