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Appendix E Open Source Licences
NSA320 User’s Guide
520
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 non-
commercial 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