Re: [boost] Interest in a Boost.Chrono/Date library

Subject: Re: [boost] Interest in a Boost.Chrono/Date library
From: Philip Bennefall (philip_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-11-02 19:17:19

On 11/2/2015 11:46 PM, Ion Gaztañaga wrote:
> On 02/11/2015 1:06, Howard Hinnant wrote:
>> I did not intend for there to be a “binary clause" for this date/time
>> library.  My intent was to make this library have as small a legal
>> footprint as possible.
>
> Thanks for the details Howard. According to
>
> http://www.boost.org/development/requirements.html#License
>
> it seems to me that MIT License should be acceptable in Boostt... Snip

Personally, even if individual authors who place their code under the 
MIT license do or do not intend it to require binary attribution, I have 
seen plenty of MIT licensed project authors who do interpret it as 
requiring attribution as part of derivative works in binary form - hence 
the ambiguity. I come back to this section again"

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
  all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

It does not make any distinction between the software as distributed in 
source code form, precompiled unmodified form, a derivative work in 
source code form , a derivative work in object code form etc. To me it 
is obvious that the MIT license does require the copyright notices to 
appear in source code copies of the software (whether in its original 
form or as part of a derivative work), for the simple reason that this 
is the way in which the original software is distributed (at least in 
the case of a Boost library). This is of course what the BSL says too. 
But it seems to me that the case of attribution in closed source 
derivative works is very much a matter of opinion, depending on how you 
interpret the words "copies" and "substantial portions of the software". 
What constitutes a substantial portion? Am I still distributing "the 
software" if I use a library as part of a closed source derivative work? 
I should think so, in which case I would assume that the attribution 
clause does apply. But I am not sure. These are the questions which I 
feel the Boost license answers clearly, and which is where I think the 
two licenses are incompatible.

Kind regards,

Philip Bennefall