Comments on: The Boost C++ Libraries Intermission – Getting Boost Used

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:23:45 +0000

Matt, that offer from QSS is great – I wonder if they have ever had to defend anyone. And I wonder if they use boost internally. Last time I checked, Microsoft offers nothing of the sort except to maybe up to the limit of the money you paid them to license the product.

I am not a lawyer, but I can tell you that your software already infringes on any number of patents and is theoretically liable for millions of dollars in damages. All software is, regardless of whether they use boost or not. The trade off is gaining a tiny amount of risk for losing a vast amount of development cost.

But not every company sees it my way…

By: matt

matt — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:49:29 +0000

the explanation that i currently have to live with is that using boost (or, by extension, other non-commercial software) does not give our company indemnity against intellectual property claims. in other words, there’s no third-party there to defend us if we are found to have infringed on copyright or patents, or whatever, by using their software.

some commercial licences do offer indemnity against such claims, even when open source software is used within the software itself. a great example is the qnx operating system. see the LIMITED WARRANTY OF PROVENANCE, INDEMNITY, AND EXCLUSIONS FROM INDEMNITY section of their license.

so the answer is clear. go and hire the lawyers that work at qnx software systems.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:34:30 +0000

My boss has banned boost and STL because of “code bloat”. Instead we use such awesome constructs as sprintf, fixed size strings (char szText[STR]), strcat, strlen, etc. My boss also wonders why we get a lot of bugs. Go figure.

He introduces his own “code bloat” anyway through use of templates (For “long” strings only) so we aren’t doing anything differently to STL anyway, except for using less tested, less thought out and less useful code. Constantly my colleagues and I are saying, “So why doesn’t our list class provide a reverse iterator?”, “Because it is singly linked”, “Oh. Why? STL has doubly linked lists”, “I know, our boss doesn’t like doubly linked because ‘it is just code bloat’”.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:17:13 +0000

This is a somewhat valid reason for not using boost, and one of the reasons that boost uptake was slow at my current place of work. There are already a lot of libraries that do part of what boost does (MFC, ATL, etc) not too mention homemade ones. There is no point in ripping out ugly but functional code just to use a cool, new library.

For new code, or even just new parts of existing projects I always push for boost. I would argue that it is so modular that even if you are not using the shared_ptrs or strings, the thread library or iostreams (or asio, or hash, or whatever) make it worthwhile to include in the codebase. Half the time you don’t even have to link to anything.

But I realise that not every project needs these features.

By: David

David — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:21:34 +0000

At “large international software company” it’s not the Boost license which rules out Boost. Boost is used for example in another product which has a very similar name to the product I work on (very very similar name). But we already have invented-here string, date and shared pointer classes. Little things like to_lower_copy would be very handy, but aren’t enough to justify adding yet another library to work with.