Boost and the Lawyers: A Happy Ending (well for us anyway)

From: Brian bneal_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-01-30 20:08:41

Hello again,
A while back I posted a series of questions about what other people 
had done to make their companies lawyers happy about using boost in a 
commercial project. If you remember, I stated that our lawyers were 
worried that someone could post someone else's code to boost, passing 
it of as his own. Our company would then be liable for copyright 
infringement and other bad things. We thought at the time that we 
would have to contact each and every boost developer (whose libraries 
we use) and get them to sign something to say in effect "Yes I wrote 
this and you have permission to use it". This raised interesting 
questions like "should there be a standard boost license to make this 
process less painful"?

Well our contracts guy got back to my team of developers. He checked 
out www.boost.org and did some research on boost. He came to the 
conclusion that boost was a widely known and used resource, and I 
guess "trustworthy". All he told us to do was include the boost 
developers copyright statements on any GUI and to embed said 
copyright strings into the executable along with ours. Somehow we 
lucked out. 

I hope you all have sensible people working for your company too.

Thanks,
BN 

And special thanks to the authors of the crc, shared_ptr, regex, and
any libraries. You guys ROCK!