[Insight-developers] COPYRIGHT Issues with code from Numerical Recipes

[Luis Ibanez]

It was pointed out to us yesterday that certain pieces
of code distributed with ITK were copied from the source
code of Numerical Recipes in C.


In particular the code in the function:

    vnl_brent::minimize_given_bounds_and_1st_f

in lines 118 to 182 of

    Insight/Utilities/vxl/core/vnl/algo/vnl_brent.cxx

seems to have been taken from the file

               brent.c


The distribution license of Numerical Recipes:

http://www.numerical-recipes.com/infotop.html#licenseinfo

is not compatible with the ITK license:

http://www.itk.org/HTML/Copyright.htm


Therefore, this function has been removed today.

http://www.itk.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/Utilities/vxl/core/vnl/algo/vnl_brent.cxx?root=Insight&sortby=date&r2=1.3&r1=1.2



If you find any other code in ITK that seems to have been
copied from Numerical Recipes (or any other source with
licensing incompatible with ITK) PLEASE LET US KNOW,
so that we can take appropriate action.


We are also interested in exploring the use of source code
comparison tools that may help us to parse the repository
in search of code similar to known sources (such as Numerical
Recipes)


Our searches on the web has pointed us to the following
Source code similarity analyzers:


SIMIAN:
http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/products/simian/

SIM:
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/sim.html

Unfortunately these two tools do not seem to be open source.


If you are aware of any Open Source tools for measuring
source code similarity please send us pointers to them.



    Thanks



       Luis