on 12/3/02 1:44 PM, Terje Slettebų at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Is Adobe asking for more from a non-profit community like Boost, than they > are willing to give themselves, for software they sell? This license is for > the free Acrobat Reader, but I doubt the commercial versions are much > different in this respect. In any case, Boost is free, as well. The above > license also has an "AS IS" clause.
As I said - we aren't asking for any more (but our lawyers will take as much as they can get). > Isn't the case more one of how much they can depend on support and > development (such as a company or community backing something up), rather > than guarantees about the software being made? No - the concern from legal is about exposure. If we include sources from boost, they contain an "AS IS" clause and contains IP encumbered material then we're the ones that get nailed. You'd be surprised. I've reviewed code that was taken verbatim from a GPL code base with a contractors copyright notice slapped on the top (and the GPL notice removed); code that has been copied from journals describing patented algorithms; fielded the call from an irate individual that claimed we had taken his code, which he explicitly placed in the public domain, and we were selling it commercially (he was confused as to the difference between public domain and GPL type licenses) - it didn't matter because we didn't use his code anyway; and I've shipped off boxes of software to compensate an individual or two for their code finding its way into one of our products inadvertently. We do legal audits of all materials included on all of our SKUs - that's a lot of material including pictures, fonts, plug-ins, tutorials... not to mention the few million lines of code in the actual product. With sources provided we expect we'll be doing our own maintenance - and determining the general quality of a code base isn't difficult. Adobe is a large software company - and we've been through a fair amount of litigation. Partially because of that, and partially because of the desire not to repeat the mistakes of PARC (a large number of our researches our out of XEROX - including the company founders) we have a _very_ conservative stance towards both using and contributing to open source efforts. I've been making an ongoing effort to make it easier for us to both use and contribute to the open source community. My most notable success to date (that's externally visible) has been getting the XMP SDK available under a fairly non-restrictive license: <http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/> Adobe had a previous open source effort started by one of my co-workers: <http://opensource.adobe.com/> Unfortunately he fell ill and the site hasn't been maintained. I've been trying to find resources within the company to resurrect this effort - but in the current economic climate that's been tough. -- Sean Parent Sr. Computer Scientist II Advanced Technology Group Adobe Systems Incorporated [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost