>Since boost is a spring board for standardization of a library, I'm >wondering if the boost license requires the copyright notice to follow >for other implementations which follow the interface of the boost >library, but independently develop the implementation?
A copyright, unlike a patent, just applies to the actual representation. So unless another implementation actually made a literal copy of the Boost code, the other implementation would not be a derived work of the Boost code and so would not have to follow the Boost license.
This has already happened; the Dinkumware CoreX threads library follows the Boost.Threads interface. But because they implemented from scratch, they didn't have to reproduce the copyright or license.
Now you might ask, "what about the interface, doesn't the copyright cover that too?" The answer is "no", as has been fought out in court several times. Ask a lawyer for details, but interfaces themselves aren't covered by copyright. The docs are covered, the header is covered, the implementation, test cases, etc, are all covered, but not the conceptual interface.
>In other words, if we standardize a boost library, will the library's >copyright notice have to be in all implementations of that std::lib?
No, because the standard won't copy the actual library code. The standard may copy actual prose wording from the proposal, and that in turn may have been derived from the library's documentation, but the proposer will have to assign the copyright to ISO on any portion of the wording that reaches the actual standard document.
At one time some of us who wrote text for the standard actually had to sign a copyright assignment to ISO, but then IIRC ISO just decided they automatically became the copyright holder by some sort of international treaty eminent domain, and stopped actually asking for a written assignment.
>Will the copyright need to appear in the standard itself?
Not normally. There are three exceptions in the current standard, if you look at 1.10. So much of the standard wording came from three books by Stroustrup, Kernigahan & Ritchie, and Plauger that a special deal was cut with them. The three short paragraphs in 1.10 took a long time to negotiate.
Another aspect of standardization is that anyone who proposes something for standardization has to publicly announce if it is covered by a patent. There was a recent court case (something about hardware memory IIRC) where the proposer waited until after something got standardized, and then said "you now owe my company royalties if you implement the standard". The judge invalidated the patent. It would have been perfectly valid if the proposer had pre-announced the existence of the patent.
--Beman
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