BSL Copyright Notice

Question

According to the BSL using Boost requires

The copyright notices in the Software [...] must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part, and all derivative works of the Software, unless such copies or derivative works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor

I'm not quite sure about this sentence. Do I have to grep all copyright notices from the source files/headers for the version I use, like somebody already did (https://github.com/Tencent/mars/blob/master/Copyright%20Notice%20of%20Boost)? That would be as far as I currently see over 2000 different statements.

Answer 1

The Boost Software Licence (BSL) requires that

The copyright notices in the Software ... must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part, and all derivative works of the Software

The copy you already have has all those entries in already. Using it requires nothing further from you. Should you wish to distribute copies, they, too, will already have those entries in.

Should you wish to make significant changes to Boost or excerpt a significant portion of it, and redistribute it as part of your project complete with source, then the approach the github user you link to has taken strikes me as a fairly pragmatic one, and one which ensures that no copyright line will get left out merely because you haven't needed to use the particular source file in which it occurs. 2000 lines might seem like a lot, but the Boost libraries (v1.69.0) weigh in at some 4.3MLOC, so if the libraries are useful to you then the obligation seems fairly light, at least to me.

But if you're redistributing binary-only ("solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor") which you now say you are, then you have no obligation to redistribute any of those lines.