Re: [Boost-Users] boost vs. The Lawyers (non-technical)

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-10-09 20:37:56

At 07:14 PM 10/8/2002, Brian Neal wrote:

 >I hope this is appropriate for this mailing list...
 >
 >I am a software engineer and our development team loves boost. However, I
 >can already see a coming battle with our company lawyers trying to 
convince
 >them to let us use boost in our software. We informally talked with one 
of
 >our software quality engineers. He said their major concern would be
 >assuring that we had permission to use the boost software. In other 
words,
 >how would we know that the boost developers had permission to release 
their
 >libraries so that anyone could use it? He also thought we would need
 >something in writing to this effect. Since their isn't any official boost
 >organization, I am getting scared already.
 >
 >I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but I would like to hear from
 >any boost developer or user who has experiences in dealing with this
 >nonsense.

I've dealt with it several times now.  Two or three of the biggest software 
companies in the world have contacted me when they started to use Boost 
code. While their lawyers asked a few questions, and one even made a 
suggestion or two to improve our license policy, they basically lost 
interest pretty quickly and okayed Boost use.

The "how would we know that the boost developers had permission to 
release..." question did come up once. I just said that they had no 
assurance that Boost developers owned the code they claimed copyright on, 
just as they had no assurance that any other material they used (from their 
programmers, their suppliers, etc) was actually original, except in the 
(nonexistant) cases where the company lawyer had watched the code being 
written. And that given the prodigious memory some programmers have for 
code, even watching wasn't really good enough. That probably wasn't a very 
good argument, but the lawyer did seem to understand it and stopped 
complaining.

--Beman