"Darryl Green"
I'm happy to provide a patch once I'm reasonably sure I understand the license. I'm assuming an email discussion will be more productive than patches in the meantime. I have one more question that I have a proposed FAQ answer for, but my "answer" is based purely on what I think it should be, not an understanding of the law. The point that confuses me is:
If a program uses boost, the binary distro doesn't need to contain the license, but it is a derivative work. As I understand it, a derivative work contains exclusive rights both the "preexisting material" author and "contributed material" author.
Not a complete sentence. Missing "of" after "rights"?
This in turn means there must be some form of agreement as to how the derivative work can be distributed. The boost license seems to deal with that by saying that the derivative work must contain the boost license wording unless the derivative work is object code.
Basically right.
That seems to result in a reasonably clear rule for derivative works that are not object code. What I'm not sure on is whether the grant to allow derivative works, combined with permission to omit the license wording from object code, gives the "contributing author" the right to distribute the object code "derived work" under any terms/license that author choses?
That was the intent, and as far as I can tell the license fulfills the intent.
Here is my proposed "patch" in a form suitable for forwarding to lawyers for "testing".
Q: Does #include
make the including file a derived work?
Translation for non-programmers (lawyers in particular):
The incantation
#include
A: No. That is use, but not derivation. But if instead of #include, you pasted in a legally significant portion of
, that would make your program a derived work. Note that if you pasted in code from several sources, your code might become a derived work of each of those sources. Source - Beman Dawes in http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/boost/1686928
Q: Is the object file produced by compiling a source file which contains #include
a derived work? A: Yes. However, the license explicitly grants the right to distribute object code derivative works (the result of compiling source which includes boost files) without the boost license.
Q: So I can apply my own choice of license terms to the object code?
A: Yes.
Is this legally and "intently" correct?
I believe so. Subject to approval by a lawyer I think we should add it to the FAQ. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com