Re: [boost] Boost licensing information

Subject: Re: [boost] Boost licensing information
From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-04-12 19:20:13

On 04/12/17 21:54, Antony Polukhin via Boost wrote:
> 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)

I think, multi-license distribution would only complicate things, both 
for developers and users, for no real gain.

> * 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.

If you can't understand the Boost license, why would you understand the 
MIT license?