Is John Maddock reading this?
Nod.
What is the story? Clearly it's not possible to take the SGI-licensed code and to re-license it under the Boost licence without either (a) getting permission or (b) knowing that the licences are compatible, which isn't true in this case in this direction.
Has this really been broken for 12 years?
Originally this code (and Boost in general) was not under the BSL, in fact most of it was under an SGI-like license. Unfortunately there were a few corner cases we couldn't easily get rid of. In the case of limits.hpp I'm almost completely sure we can just remove it, I don't think that any system that relied on it could cope with modern Boost anyway. endian.hpp is much harder, Beman what did you borrow from SGI for this one? John.