Re: [boost] Draft of new Boost Software License

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-06-26 18:51:03

At 09:18 AM 6/26/2003, Howard Hinnant wrote:

 >Since boost is a spring board for standardization of a library, I'm
 >wondering if the boost license requires the copyright notice to follow
 >for other implementations which follow the interface of the boost
 >library, but independently develop the implementation?

A copyright, unlike a patent, just applies to the actual representation. So 
unless another implementation actually made a literal copy of the Boost 
code, the other implementation would not be a derived work of the Boost 
code and so would not have to follow the Boost license.

This has already happened; the Dinkumware CoreX threads library follows the 
Boost.Threads interface. But because they implemented from scratch, they 
didn't have to reproduce the copyright or license.

Now you might ask, "what about the interface, doesn't the copyright cover 
that too?" The answer is "no", as has been fought out in court several 
times. Ask a lawyer for details, but interfaces themselves aren't covered 
by copyright. The docs are covered, the header is covered, the 
implementation, test cases, etc, are all covered, but not the conceptual 
interface.

 >In other words, if we standardize a boost library, will the library's
 >copyright notice have to be in all implementations of that std::lib?

No, because the standard won't copy the actual library code. The standard 
may copy actual prose wording from the proposal, and that in turn may have 
been derived from the library's documentation, but the proposer will have 
to assign the copyright to ISO on any portion of the wording that reaches 
the actual standard document.

At one time some of us who wrote text for the standard actually had to sign 
a copyright assignment to ISO, but then IIRC ISO just decided they 
automatically became the copyright holder by some sort of international 
treaty eminent domain, and stopped actually asking for a written 
assignment.

 >Will the copyright need to appear in the standard itself?

Not normally. There are three exceptions in the current standard, if you 
look at 1.10. So much of the standard wording came from three books by 
Stroustrup, Kernigahan & Ritchie, and Plauger that a special deal was cut 
with them. The three short paragraphs in 1.10 took a long time to 
negotiate.

Another aspect of standardization is that anyone who proposes something for 
standardization has to publicly announce if it is covered by a patent. 
There was a recent court case (something about hardware memory IIRC) where 
the proposer waited until after something got standardized, and then said 
"you now owe my company royalties if you implement the standard". The judge 
invalidated the patent. It would have been perfectly valid if the proposer 
had pre-announced the existence of the patent.

--Beman