The Boost Software License is not just for Boost libraries. Everyone can, and should, use it.
I added the bold, and below:
Why You Should Use the Boost Software License? Because it doesn’t require attribution for binaries.
All popular licenses - MIT, Apache, BSD - contain language similar to the following:
“The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”
And, in fact, so does the Boost license, except it continues with:
“unless such copies or derivative works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor.”
The others contain no such exemption.
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What this means is that the requirement to include the copyright notice still applies. This, in practice, is met by either including the copyright notice in the documentation, having a dialog box or a--licensecommand line option that displays the license, or sometimes both (lawyers like to be on the safe side.)
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it’s much more convenient for your users if you don’t impose this attribution requirement for binaries. You still want it to apply to copies in source code form, just not to compiled code.This is what the Boost Software License was created to enable, and this is why you should use it for your open source libraries.
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It’s true that it’s a requirement to get your code in Boost, but that’s not the only benefit. It can also get your code in standard library implementations. Microsoft’s STL, for example, is now open source on Github, but since Microsoft’s customers cannot abide by a binary attribution clause, code inside the STL can only use a license that doesn’t impose one. As explained by Stephan T. Lavavej in this Reddit comment, the two licenses that meet this requirement are the Boost Software License and the Apache 2.0 License with LLVM Exception, and the Boost license is simpler, clearer, better known, and already pre-approved in many organizations.Use it. The C++ community will appreciate your generosity.
The advice seems to apply to Rust too, but they use MIT and Apache dual-licensed, and advice NOT with the LLVM exception I believe (a least usually), so they seemingly do like the attribution requirement.
I believed MIT to be pretty permissive, what Stallman call lax, but it’s not most permissive/lax (he would prefer GPL, copyleft over lax, in most cases, but not all). Other options might be CC0. For science you may want the attribution requirement… at least for some packages.