ZyXEL NSA325 User Guide - Page 500

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS OR ANYONE DISTRIBUTING THE SOFTWARE BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. 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. FAQ 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