Std. Lib and Binary Attribution

[Robert Jacques]

On Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:11:44 -0500, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> 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.