On Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:11:44 -0500, dsimcha <[email protected]> wrote:
One possible way to mitigate licensing issues for the std. lib would be
to
have std.* be exclusively Boost licensed, but allow code with slightly
less
permissive licenses (BSD, etc.) under std.extra.*. This would allow
people to
know that they don't have to worry about licensing at all as long as they
stick to std.*, but if they need a little more power and are either
working on
an internal project or don't mind sticking some attributions in their
code,
they can use std.extra.
Walter is absolutely right that it would be very bad to require an
attribution
just to write a word count program or something simple like that.
However,
there's lots of good BSD-licensed code out there that would only be used
in
larger projects where sticking attributions in a LICENSE.txt file is
really
not a big deal. We could even make a pre-made attribution file for
users of
std.extra that already has all relevant attributions in it. Furthermore,
std.extra would be greppable if you wanted to avoid the attribution
requirement.
Does this sound like a reasonable compromise or is the "no attribution
in std.
lib. code" an absolute non-negotiable?
The problem is that if std.extra gets statically linked in (i.e. in the
normal manner), then you'd have to include the license, even if you don't
use the library.
