Std. Lib and Binary Attribution

dsimcha dsimcha at yahoo.com
Fri Nov 13 11:11:44 PST 2009


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?



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