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Appendix E Open Source Licences
Media Server User’s Guide
499
RATIONALE
The following rationale was provided by Devin Smith, the lawyer who wrote the Boost Software
License. It has been edited slightly for brevity. Editorial additions are shown in square brackets.
BENEFIT OF COMMON SOFTWARE LICENSE
If one of Boost's goals is to ease use and adoption of the various libraries made available by Boost,
it does make sense to try to standardize the licenses under which the libraries are made available to
users. (I make some recommendations about a possible short-form license below.)
[Standardizing the license will not] necessarily address the issue of satisfying corporate licensees.
Each corporation will have its own concerns, based on their own experiences with software licensing
and distribution and, if they're careful, will want to carefully review each license, even if they've
been told that they're all standard. I would expect that, unless we're remarkably brilliant (or lucky)
in drafting the standard Boost license, the standard license won't satisfy the legal departments of
all corporations. I imagine that some will, for instance, absolutely insist that licensors provide a
warranty of title and provide indemnification for third-party intellectual property infringement
claims. Others may want functional warranties. (If I were advising the corporations, I would point
out that they're not paying anything for the code and getting such warranties from individual
programmers, who probably do not have deep pockets, is not that valuable anyway, but other
lawyers may disagree.)
But this can be addressed, not by trying to craft the perfect standard license, but by informing the
corporations that they can, if they don't like the standard license, approach the authors to negotiate
a different, perhaps even paid, license.
One other benefit of adopting a standard license is to help ensure that the license accomplishes,
from a legal perspective, what the authors intend. For instance, many of the [original] licenses for
the libraries available on boost.org do not disclaim the warranty of title, meaning that the authors
could, arguably, be sued by a user if the code infringes the rights of a third party and the user is
sued by that third party. I think the authors probably want to disclaim this kind of liability.
SHORT-FORM LICENSE
Without in anyway detracting from the draft license that's been circulated [to Boost moderators],
I'd like to propose an alternative "short-form" license that Boost could have the library authors
adopt. David [Abrahams] has expressed a desire to keep things as simple as possible, and to try to
move away from past practice as little as possible, and this is my attempt at a draft.
This license, which is very similar to the BSD license and the MIT license, should satisfy the Open
Source Initiative's Open Source Definition: (i) the license permits free redistribution, (ii) the
distributed code includes source code, (iii) the license permits the creation of derivative works, (iv)
the license does not discriminate against persons or groups, (v) the license does not discriminate
against fields of endeavor, (vi) the rights apply to all to whom the program is redistributed, (vii) the
license is not specific to a product, and (viii) the license is technologically neutral (i.e., it does not
[require] an explicit gesture of assent in order to establish a contract between licensor and
licensee).
This license grants all rights under the owner's copyrights (as well as an implied patent license),
disclaims all liability for use of the code (including intellectual property infringement liability), and
requires that all subsequent copies of the code [except machine-executable object code], including
partial copies and derivative works, include the license.
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