Re: Boost.Text review

From: Darryl Green (darryl.green_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-06-19 04:45:37

I also am not a lawyer but know from experience that you can't copyright
data, or simple expressions of it. A program is an original work. A table
of facts it uses is not. Someone can write what they like in a licence but
if the table can be (ideally, has been) produced manually or
algorithmically from information (published in whatever form, even if
copyright) that simply conveys facts you can use it. There is some
risk/issue if you use the way the facts are arranged "creatively" e.g. as a
graph or figure or if included in a database (that is organised
"creatively" to allow use/retrieval) etc.. Also copyright does not protect
an underlying algorithm - only the program that implements it. And if there
is simply/only one obvious way to represent said algorithm etc it doesn't
prevent one writing the same thing... Obviously a whole program composed of
fragments that aren't individually copyrightable but "creatively arranged"
in some original program can't then be arranged into a "new" program to
form a whole that is - effectively - the original work without that copying
of creative arrangement being a breach of copyright ...

Also there may be a need to cite sources. and this is only polite -
reasonable anyway -  but that does NOT require things like inclusion of
copyright notices with distributed binaries etc. Citing the source in the
comments/ docs / readme other human readable content of the work (the
source code) is sufficient.

I have purposely not, so far, looked at the specifics of this (original
source of this table or usage in proposed boost.text). I might be being
naive in my assumption that this is a relatively simple expression of facts.
It might be necessary for the removal of all doubt to produce a boost table
and code that uses it from primary sources and descriptions (not programs)
re how the table/algorithm is used/works.

On Fri, 19 Jun 2020, 4:25 am Vinnie Falco via Boost, <boost_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 11:22 AM Phil Endecott via Boost
> <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > if I understand correctly, Zach's code includes tables that are
> > derived from Unicode data and the licence for that data requires
> > a copyright attribution.
>
> Could we ask the owner of the copyright to dual-license the data under
> the BSL? That might be a cheap and easy solution.
>
> Thanks
>
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