Re: [boost] Boost licensing information

Subject: Re: [boost] Boost licensing information
From: Antony Polukhin (antoshkka_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-04-12 18:54:06

2017-04-11 15:32 GMT+03:00 Fabrizio Riente via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>:
<...>
> I was wandering if under this license it is possible to distribute the
> application for free to other universities and interested people without
> sharing the source code.

This issue often confuses users. Especially non native speakers for
whom all that perfectly measured legal words make absolutely no sense!
Seriously, I need to spend about an hour to understand what a license
is talking about. And I *know* the restrictions, it's just
unbelievably hard to convert legal words to understanding.

What's worse - BSL is not a very popular license. There's probably
only 1-2 pages in non-English languages about BSL on wikipedia. Other
wiki pages redirect from BSL to Boost libraries. So for example I can
get no information about BSL in Russian. I've tried twice to translate
BSL to Russian. Both times the wiki page was removed as a
minor/useless topic.

Could we somehow solve the issue in Boost by
* also distributing Boost under the MIT license (super extremely very
close license)
* or by summarizing the differences between BSL and MIT in simple
English like here http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/44116

And it's really an issue! I know at least 6 small Russian companies
that do not use Boost libraries because they could not get through the
license.

-- 
Best regards,
Antony Polukhin