SciD (Was: Real Close to the Machine: Floating Point in D )

[Bill Baxter]

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Georg Wrede <georg.wrede at iki.fi> wrote:
> Lars T. Kyllingstad wrote:
>>
>> 2. I have to figure out some licensing issues. Some algorithms are clearly
>> public domain, while some things -- like code I've ripped off Numerical
>> Recipes, for instance -- is more questionable. (Although the NR guys do
>> quite a lot of off-ripping themselves. ;)
>
>
> If you're talking about any one of the books that come up when entering
> "Numerical Recipes" in the Amazon search box, I'd say that those recipes are
> freely usable. That's why they're in the books.
>
> Checking, of course may be good, but if anyone publishes recipes in a book
> and then sues people for actually using them, I'd sue *them* for entrapment.

Well you'd better call your lawyer then. :-)

The usage terms on the classic Numerical Recipes are terrible.
Basically you're only allowed to use their code if you purchased a
copy of the book.  Which basically means if you use their code, then
you are not allowed to share the NR portion of your code with anyone
who does not own the book.

Their code is not so pretty anyway, so much better to just read the
ideas and implement it yourself, thus avoiding any potential legal
hassle.

SciPy has recently done a sweep through their code purging anything
that looks like it was derived from NR code for this reason.  They
also went through and made it clear in all comments which refer to NR
for explanations of algorithms that they did NOT use NR code as a
basis for the code in SciPy.

--bb