Re: [boost] Boost licensing information

On 04/12/17 21:54, Antony Polukhin via Boost wrote:

2017-04-11 15:32 GMT+03:00 Fabrizio Riente via Boost : <...>

...

I was wandering if under this license it is possible to distribute the application for free to other universities and interested people without sharing the source code.

This issue often confuses users. Especially non native speakers for whom all that perfectly measured legal words make absolutely no sense! Seriously, I need to spend about an hour to understand what a license is talking about. And I *know* the restrictions, it's just unbelievably hard to convert legal words to understanding.

What's worse - BSL is not a very popular license. There's probably only 1-2 pages in non-English languages about BSL on wikipedia. Other wiki pages redirect from BSL to Boost libraries. So for example I can get no information about BSL in Russian. I've tried twice to translate BSL to Russian. Both times the wiki page was removed as a minor/useless topic.

Could we somehow solve the issue in Boost by * also distributing Boost under the MIT license (super extremely very close license)

I think, multi-license distribution would only complicate things, both for developers and users, for no real gain.

* or by summarizing the differences between BSL and MIT in simple English like here http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/44116

And it's really an issue! I know at least 6 small Russian companies that do not use Boost libraries because they could not get through the license.

If you can't understand the Boost license, why would you understand the MIT license?