Re: [Boost-users] A need for a COOKBOOK

From: Kirit Sælensminde (kirit.saelensminde_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-09-23 04:44:14

dhruva wrote:
> I just hope we never lose the communities interest. Frankly, I
> personally would feel more comfortable if it is hosted on boost.org
> A privately held company hosting a WIKI based setup to get the
> community involved should not end up making it propitiatory and have a
> COPYRIGHT since it was hosted on their servers. We just need to be
> cautious.

Unless everybody contributing assigns their copyright to my company 
(which was never going to be asked for) then the company won't end up 
owning anything that it doesn't already own. Each contributor will 
retain copyright on what they contribute.

What is really of question here though is what license contributors 
agree to by contributing. Personally I think that the descriptions will 
need to be fairly permissive, something like the Creative Commons 
attribution license (CC-by) and the code needs to be under something 
very permissive, something like an MIT or BSD license but without the 
need to attribute or include any copyright notices. People need to be 
able to copy the code into their own code base without needing to worry 
about any legal ramifications of doing so. Turning the code over to the 
public domain is probably closest.

As for the community interest, I guess we will see whether it garners 
any traction or not once it is turned on. If a more official Boost 
organisation wishes to take on the site then we will provide the 
software and the data for that.

Just to make this absolutely clear, my company's commercial interest in 
this is to promote its software, but the content of the site. As the 
software that runs the site is built with Boost it seems an appropriate 
way of doing it and giving something of use back to the Boost community.

> I do appreciate the fact that someone has seriously come forward, it
> is a good step forward.

Thank you. I hope that I will get enough of it done in the next few 
hours to put it live.

K