I came across the first edition (1986) of this book on one of my father's bookshelves while visiting last solstice. He'd acquired as a library discard when USRD was shut down in the 1990's (i.e. it was headed to the dumpster) and it had sat since. I knew nothing about it, but it looked interesting.
Last night, I was looking for something to read on my bookshelf and the now my copy caught my eye. But before reading it I was curious about it as a book...i.e. was it rare and so I googled it up, came across the link, and posted it here since its history was interesting. And then I shut off the computer and started reading.
There's a lot of criticism here about the licensing model. While I agree that GNU or MIT might be more utopian, I think the premises of the criticism are largely premised in historical counter-factuals.
The book was published in 1985-1986 (see the Wikipedia article) [2]. There was no GNU license, no BSD, [1] and as best I can tell from a few minutes googling, no MIT license either. It was the time of the Unix Wars that led to our contemporary licensing landscape. The big choice was between public domain and proprietary licensing (and the practices of proprietary licensing were typically a long way from where we are today).
All this is to say that the code in Numerical Recipes was an improvement in the landscape at the time it was released. A person could look at the source code for the price of a book versus the cost of a commercial license or dealing with a black box. A programmer could kick the tires of Numerical Recipes before buying. A paid license also provided an incentive to improve the product and that produced code in Fortran, Pascal, C, C++ and a host of other languages...all with the ability to kick the tires.
It is also worth pointing out that the code in many many books is not released under an open source license. The typical case is for code in books to be published with strong copyright claims and all rights reserved. Even today, the availability of an explicit software license is an improvement over a number of currently published programming books.
Again, there are utopias I'd rather live in, but the licensing of Numerical Recipes is better than most commercial operating systems.
Last night, I was looking for something to read on my bookshelf and the now my copy caught my eye. But before reading it I was curious about it as a book...i.e. was it rare and so I googled it up, came across the link, and posted it here since its history was interesting. And then I shut off the computer and started reading.
There's a lot of criticism here about the licensing model. While I agree that GNU or MIT might be more utopian, I think the premises of the criticism are largely premised in historical counter-factuals.
The book was published in 1985-1986 (see the Wikipedia article) [2]. There was no GNU license, no BSD, [1] and as best I can tell from a few minutes googling, no MIT license either. It was the time of the Unix Wars that led to our contemporary licensing landscape. The big choice was between public domain and proprietary licensing (and the practices of proprietary licensing were typically a long way from where we are today).
All this is to say that the code in Numerical Recipes was an improvement in the landscape at the time it was released. A person could look at the source code for the price of a book versus the cost of a commercial license or dealing with a black box. A programmer could kick the tires of Numerical Recipes before buying. A paid license also provided an incentive to improve the product and that produced code in Fortran, Pascal, C, C++ and a host of other languages...all with the ability to kick the tires.
It is also worth pointing out that the code in many many books is not released under an open source license. The typical case is for code in books to be published with strong copyright claims and all rights reserved. Even today, the availability of an explicit software license is an improvement over a number of currently published programming books.
Again, there are utopias I'd rather live in, but the licensing of Numerical Recipes is better than most commercial operating systems.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Recipes