4 ms·

IIRC the Numerical Recipes book was a bit of a copyright Trojan Horse. (I don't know if that's really true, I just heard it mentioned somewhere.) Presumably t

IIRC the Numerical Recipes book was a bit of a copyright Trojan Horse. (I don't know if that's really true, I just heard it mentioned somewhere.) Presumably this book doesn't carry that risk.

hgsgm 3y ago
Everything written is copyrighted, whether it's in a published book or not.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I wasn’t aware of the issue, but a Wikipedia seems to indicate that there was a concern that the specific implementations of the algorithms in Numerical Recipes are copyrighted, and there’s always a temptation to copy that sort of thing directly out of the book. The linked PDF here is a big collection of mathematical identities. I’m sure their specific representation in the PDF is copyrighted somehow, but there’s no real temptation to use the representation here, just the mathematical idea.
- eesmith 3y ago
  Not quite. In the US at least, works by the federal government are not covered under copyright. Nor are 'mere facts' (eg, a complete list of phone numbers and names for a region). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Works_subject_to_copyright_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... . bee_rider already referred to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Recipes#License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Recipes#License so I leave it at that.
- gmiller123456 3y ago
  That's not the issue. The license is akin to buying software, then finding out you have to pay an additional license to run it, even on your personal computer.
darthoctopus 3y ago
previous discussion of these problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895307 > The real problem is the Numerical Recipes license, which is extremely restrictive - probably more so than most users realize. I won't dignify it with a link, but you can find licensing terms on their website. NR routines are copyrighted (fine) and cannot be redistributed as source (annoying but not uncommon for COMMERCIAL software, somewhat unusual for scientific software). There is no exception for noncommercial or scientific use, which is Grinchy and irritating, especially given that two of the authors acknowledge funding from the NSF for work on numerical methods. Beyond that, the single-CPU/single-screen terms of their license are almost impossible for a working scientist to comply with, especially in a networked environment.
BeetleB 3y ago
> IIRC the Numerical Recipes book was a bit of a copyright Trojan Horse. (I don't know if that's really true, I just heard it mentioned somewhere.) Oh yes, this brings back memories. The first edition, I believe, had a fairly permissive license. The second edition had a more restrictive license (it probably wasn't that bad - the authors wanted a payment for use, and I don't think it was a lot). I was an undergrad doing a summer internship with a professor, and he wanted me to implement the method of steepest descent (or something similar) in Fortran for his computation. He told me to just copy it from the NR book. I dutifully looked at the license and told him we needed to pay to use it. He looked at it and said "Wow, they've gone hard core." Then he handed the book back to me and said "Well, we need an implementation in Fortran. Find a way, and don't come back to me until it's done." I'm pretty sure that was code for "Do it and don't tell anyone." I instead spent days finding code online that was not restricted. Finally got one that worked. Later on I spoke to numerical computation researchers and they had a universal disdain for that book. Apparently a lot of the algorithms were outdated - even when the book was published. Better algorithms existed, and they were numerically stable.

IIRC the Numerical Recipes book was a bit of a copyright Trojan Horse. (I don't know if that's really true, I just heard it mentioned somewhere.) Presumably this book doesn't carry that risk.

hgsgm 3y ago

Everything written is copyrighted, whether it's in a published book or not.

bee_rider 3y ago
I wasn’t aware of the issue, but a Wikipedia seems to indicate that there was a concern that the specific implementations of the algorithms in Numerical Recipes are copyrighted, and there’s always a temptation to copy that sort of thing directly out of the book. The linked PDF here is a big collection of mathematical identities. I’m sure their specific representation in the PDF is copyrighted somehow, but there’s no real temptation to use the representation here, just the mathematical idea.
eesmith 3y ago
Not quite. In the US at least, works by the federal government are not covered under copyright. Nor are 'mere facts' (eg, a complete list of phone numbers and names for a region). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Works_subject_to_copyright_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... . bee_rider already referred to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Recipes#License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Recipes#License so I leave it at that.
gmiller123456 3y ago
That's not the issue. The license is akin to buying software, then finding out you have to pay an additional license to run it, even on your personal computer.

darthoctopus 3y ago

previous discussion of these problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895307 > The real problem is the Numerical Recipes license, which is extremely restrictive - probably more so than most users realize. I won't dignify it with a link, but you can find licensing terms on their website. NR routines are copyrighted (fine) and cannot be redistributed as source (annoying but not uncommon for COMMERCIAL software, somewhat unusual for scientific software). There is no exception for noncommercial or scientific use, which is Grinchy and irritating, especially given that two of the authors acknowledge funding from the NSF for work on numerical methods. Beyond that, the single-CPU/single-screen terms of their license are almost impossible for a working scientist to comply with, especially in a networked environment.

BeetleB 3y ago

> IIRC the Numerical Recipes book was a bit of a copyright Trojan Horse. (I don't know if that's really true, I just heard it mentioned somewhere.) Oh yes, this brings back memories. The first edition, I believe, had a fairly permissive license. The second edition had a more restrictive license (it probably wasn't that bad - the authors wanted a payment for use, and I don't think it was a lot). I was an undergrad doing a summer internship with a professor, and he wanted me to implement the method of steepest descent (or something similar) in Fortran for his computation. He told me to just copy it from the NR book. I dutifully looked at the license and told him we needed to pay to use it. He looked at it and said "Wow, they've gone hard core." Then he handed the book back to me and said "Well, we need an implementation in Fortran. Find a way, and don't come back to me until it's done." I'm pretty sure that was code for "Do it and don't tell anyone." I instead spent days finding code online that was not restricted. Finally got one that worked. Later on I spoke to numerical computation researchers and they had a universal disdain for that book. Apparently a lot of the algorithms were outdated - even when the book was published. Better algorithms existed, and they were numerically stable.