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Hope they check more than open source

Posted Jun 2, 2005 5:05 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
Parent article: IP Software Compliance Tools -- Who Needs Them and Why?

I know of a case where programmers for a proprietary company used code from "Numerical Recipes in C" in a product. Since they were honest people, they credited the source in the documentation, thinking that it was public domain code, free for the taking. Needless to say, it's not; the lawyers wound up sorting that one out.

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Posted Jun 2, 2005 10:28 UTC (Thu) by rjw (guest, #10415) [Link]

I think thats quite a dodgy precedent really. I would have thought that the intended purpose of text books would imply some licence .... IANAL.

Seems like bad faith though. "Here is how to do numerical recipes in C. But don't actually *do* them after you read this!" Very odd....

Do you have a reference to this incident?

Hope they check more than open source

Posted Jun 2, 2005 17:16 UTC (Thu) by DennisJ (subscriber, #14700) [Link]

Distribution info for Numerical Recipes:

http://www.nr.com/infotop.html#distinfo

Only some of the code is public domain. For the rest, maybe it's easier to find something free on netlib (NR say this too, if you want to distribute the source).