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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Be very careful, though! I just saw that okamiueru pointed out that the sample code from the book is under a proprietary license that forbids commercial use: https://github.com/Apress/Ray-Tracing-Gems-II/blob/main/LICE...

So if at some point in the future you want to write code like this, reading this book might putting you, your employer, or free-software projects you contribute to at legal risk :(

The Ray Tracing Gems I book code doesn't have this problem! https://github.com/Apress/ray-tracing-gems/blob/master/LICEN...

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They don’t want you to repackage the book or sell parts of it. If you want to learn from it or write similar code, they aren’t going to sue you

It's reassuring that you're close personal friends with NVIDIA's current senior management team and can therefore report on their motivations, but have you considered that their plans may change in the future, or they may be replaced, due to mergers or stockholder lawsuits? Think about the Unisys LZW extortion campaign, for example, which happened after the legitimate business of Unisys had collapsed.

If they really aren't going to sue you for writing similar code, they could formalize that in a way that's binding on future management by attaching a free-software license to the example code. That's what they did with the previous book in the series.

Instead, they specifically changed the license for the code examples in this book to ensure that they can sue you for writing similar code in the future.

Update: problem has been fixed! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28103497

License has been changed to MIT.

That's wonderful news! I really appreciate the efforts of the folks at NVIDIA that eliminated that legal risk. Adam Marrs was the committer, but I realize he may have had to get buy-in from other people.

The whole book is under a proprietary license that forbids commercial use (and forbids modifications). CC-BY-NC-ND => Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives.

So was the previous book, but in both case there's a separate, more liberal license for the code samples. Code samples in a programming book are a tricky case: when you're reading a programming book that has code samples, in a sense the whole purpose is for you to be able to write more code later on, for the rest of your life in fact, that's "substantially similar" to the code samples in the book. Which means that, under US law anyway, it's copyright infringement, unless the similarity is limited to purely functional aspects of the code, a fact of which you may have to persuade a nontechnical jury.

This has been used by the authors of the Numerical Recipes series for decades to extort royalties from programmers who learned about numerical algorithms from their books.

The explanatory text is not subject to the same problem; you read the explanatory text in order to understand the code, not in order to be able to write more explanatory text substantially similar to what is in the book.

Update: problem has been fixed! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28103497

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