Appendix E Open Source Licences

How should Boost programmers apply the license to source and header files? Add a comment based on the following template, substituting appropriate text for the italicized portion:

//Copyright Joe Coder 2004 - 2006.

//Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.

//(See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at

//http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

Please leave an empty line before and after the above comment block. It is fine if the copyright and license messages are not on different lines; in no case there should be other intervening text. Do not include "All rights reserved" anywhere.

Other ways of licensing source files have been considered, but some of them turned out to unintentionally nullify legal elements of the license. Having fixed language for referring to the license helps corporate legal departments evaluate the boost distribution. Creativity in license reference language is strongly discouraged, but judicious changes in the use of whitespace are fine.

How should the license be applied to documentation files, instead? Very similarly to the way it is applied to source files: the user should see the very same text indicated in the template above, with the only difference that both the local and the web copy of LICENSE_1_0.txt should be linked to. Refer to the HTML source code of this page in case of doubt.

Note that the location of the local LICENSE_1_0.txt needs to be indicated relatively to the position of your documentation file (../LICENSE_1_0.txt, ../../ LICENSE_1_0.txt etc.)

How is the Boost license different from the GNU General Public License (GPL)? The Boost license permits the creation of derivative works for commercial or noncommercial use with no legal requirement to release your source code. Other differences include Boost not requiring reproduction of copyright messages for object code redistribution, and the fact that the Boost license is not "viral": if you distribute your own code along with some Boost code, the Boost license applies only to the Boost code (and modified versions thereof); you are free to license your own code under any terms you like. The GPL is also much longer, and thus may be harder to understand.

Why the phrase "machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor"? To distinguish cases where we do not require reproduction of the copyrights and license, such as object libraries, shared libraries, and final program executables, from cases where reproduction is still required, such as distribution of self-extracting archives of source code or precompiled header files. More

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