Newsgroup: comp.lang.c

CBFalconer wrote:
> Diomidis Spinellis wrote:
>> A quick note to inform my fellow C programmers that my new book
>> "Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective" (Addison-Wesley, 2006)
>> has just been published.  All 623 examples I use in the book are
>> drawn from real-world open source code; most use C, as the lowest
>> common denominator.  For more details you can visit the book's
>> web site at <http://www.spinellis.gr/codequality?clc>.
> 
> I may be all wet here, but while there is nothing wrong with your
> charging for a book, I consider the material in a book based on
> open source code should also be freely available.  

You could make such a case for GPL-licensed code, although even in that 
case one would probably argue that the excerpting of code for criticism 
and commenting falls under the copyright's fair use doctrine 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use>.  Nevertheless, to be extra 
safe, all the source code used in both "Code Reading" and "Code Quality" 
is licensed under the more liberal BSD and similar licenses.  For "Code 
Reading", which included the source code on a CD-ROM, the book had all 
the relevant licenses printed as an appendix (this is a requirement of 
many licenses).

This discussion has nothing to do with comp.lang.c, and I feel guilty 
for (unwittingly) inciting it.  If I didn't answer your question, maybe 
we should discuss it further by email.

Diomidis

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