Non-free code in books... [LWN.net]

Non-free code in books...

Posted Nov 27, 2003 17:41 UTC (Thu) by dps (subscriber, #5725)
In reply to: ODSL awareness campaign misguided? by JoeBuck
Parent article: OSDL Launches Linux Kernel Awareness Initiative

It always wise to read the bits of books about the licence for any code in them. Numerical Recipies in C (and other languages) looks nice but the licence is too drastic---most people in numerical analysis do *not* have a copy so anything they produce could not have been copied from there.

At least one person has been sued for simply transfering his code, containing stuff from numerical recipies, to a supercomputer. This made the code avaialable to someone else, contrary to the numerical recipies licence.

Other bits of proprietry software are just as bad, albeit in different ways. Prohibition of "unahtorised" benchamrks and using your their program to check the results of yours is not unknown. The people behind one such effort are known to sue people at will. I will not name any names, lest their lawyers read LWN.

This sorts of thing makes me appreciate free software a whole lot more... Could be the makings of FUD about using commercial software here?

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Numerical Recipes

Posted Nov 27, 2003 20:30 UTC (Thu) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link]

Not only the license to <it>Numerical Recipes in C</it> is horrible. The code itself stinks. It is ugly, inefficient, and doesn't handle corner cases well. Existing free libraries (e.g. ATLAS, LAPACK, FFTW, GSL) do a much better job.