PocketMatrix

Once upon a time, there was a programmer.

He bought a book which described an interesting application framework. He read the book, pored through the source it contained, and saw much potential for development in his company. He downloaded the source code from the book's web-site.

He read the license. He screamed. The entire thing is GPL. The book had no mention of this potential "issue".

He mailed the authors of the code. A non-GPL version is available. For $6000.

He's .

If he'd known the source covered in the book was GPL he wouldn't have wasted his &!%$ing time with it. What good is a book discussing application architecture and covering code when you can't use that code.

Rant ends.

Maybe you should tell us which book it was, so noone else makes the same mistake?

Not going to name the book - I'm still in communications with them, discussing the matter.

The problem with this particular code is that it's the framework. That's the part that we'd like to use.

Anything that uses that code, we must give out the source to anybody who asks. Or at least that's what they say on their site. IANAL (I am not a lawyer), and all that. Frankly I'm so annoyed with the whole debacle that I'm just going to implement my own system. Weighing up the costs, the amount we'd use would be cheaper in coder-hours to code up ourselves than the $6000, and we'd have the benefit of knowing it more intimately.

I can see why they did it (i.e. we're a money-making business and we should pay something), but not putting any mention of the GPL-isation of the code in the book, sucks - it's all rather disingenious.