On 25/03/2021 04.43, Steve Downey via Lib-Ext wrote:
> In the pre-meeting chatter for SG16 there was some conversation about proposed libraries and how ready they might be for adoption into implementation stdlibs. Some of the conversation was around "ugly style" and namespaces.
> However, it's my understanding that license is a much more serious issue as to whether an implementation of a proposal can be pulled in to an implementation. I suspect that almost no non-trivial libraries have been imported directly, that is ones that aren't essentially fully defined by their synopsis.
> The question is if implementers can examine the source, if the library source is not encompassed in the standardisation proposal. I have heard that there are concerns that the Boost license addresses. I am not sure what those are, specifically. In particular with respect to a reference implementation of a proposal.
> Can we address this, somehow, in the proposals without changing the licensing of the reference implementation? I am assuming that ISO rules already prevent patent traps and such.

This seems thoroughly off-topic for this forum.
It's each implementer's choice whether they care about any
reference implementation supplied by the proposal submitter,
at all.

The job of WG21 is to make sure the specification is airtight
enough such that independent implementations are possible
and can be used to write portable programs. To that end,
it's actually a disservice to WG21 if everybody re-uses
the reference implementation instead of re-implementing
from scratch, because we usually find bugs in the
specification the moment we have independent implementations.

Jens