🚀 go-pugleaf

Eleftherios Gkioulekas (lf@amath.washington.edu) wrote:
[deletia]

: Finally, it is important to note that numerical recipies are not free
: software, so it is not appropriate to discuss them in gnu.misc.discuss,
: unless you want to discuss the nature of their license terms. 
: If you write a program that depends on numerical recipies routines
: you can not legally redistribute these routines. 

Not precisely true.  You are free to distribute source of your own
program, with instructions for the users to compile and link with
their own copy of Numerical Recipes.  You could also distribute unlinked
binaries of your program, although I'm not sure why you should want
to.  What you cannot do is distribute either linked binaries, or copies
of the NR source code.

: This is particularly onerous if you want your program to be free
: software, or if you need to _modify_ their routines.

Regrettably true.  I find that I am using NR less and less, for exactly
this reason.

: In general be very cautious of books with published source code. Always 
: review the copyright status of their code before using it in projects that 
: you might want to share with your collegues. In almost all cases that I know 
: of, such books give you no rights. The copyright terms are always stated 
: behind the book's titlepage. In Numerical Recipies, you are granted
: a License which is discussed in an unnumbered section in the beginning
: of the book. That License is extremely restrictive however. If no permissions
: or License are mentioned, this means that you are given no rights at all.
: In that case, it might even be illegal to copy the source code from the book 
: to your computer by hand. This is very sad because, as far as I am 
: concerned it makes a big chunk of these books useless to me.


Many of the routines available in Netlib have the same problem.  Either
a restrictive license, or no stated license terms, in which case you
cannot assume that you have any rights to the code.  You might be able
to make the case that intentional public posting of the code implies
certain rights to use, but I wouldn't want to try that without a
laywer.

Paul Hughett