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Earlier quoted context omitted.
"have some class" was probably a little over the top, but I can understand the frustration.
I don't know, would you call copyright infringement a "classy" thing to do?
Also, how could anyone take issue with the maintainer of https://github.com/martinemde/dicks and http://dicks.heroku.com ?
But honestly Zed, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy I just didn't "lift" your whole book and put my name on it!
At some level, you have to love zed. He gives and gives to the world, and the world just craps on him. Of course, I have a feeling that his personal brand isn't going to be helped by this exchange.
He concedes both of Zed's main points:
1. That he didn't have a legal right to "translate" the book
2. That "translating" the book from Python to Ruby didn't work all that well anyway
The rest of the message boils down to a complaint that Zed wasn't nice enough in his takedown request. While Zed could have phrased things more nicely, he wasn't especially rude given the context of clear plagiarism and copyright violation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with Zed's response, IMO, is the end. Where he says to the guy to have some class and use his own words. While I completely get what Zed is saying about asking permission. I don't think that "porting" a book is lacking class. It may turn out to be a futile effort, but in many ways I saw it as a tribute and maybe learning exercise. It would be a blast to do SICP in Java. For Java programmers the process of…
I doubt that would have helped. Being caught infringing on someone's copyright is embarrassing to say the least. Embarrassment and being given advice, no matter how well-meaning, will often not go down well. In fact, many people get extra annoyed when you're nice about this sort of thing. I think Zed's initial approach was a close approximation of the best way to handle this. Although I probably would have left it at…
And I think if you couple that with the Hacker ethos and the way code licenses in our space usually exist (BSD, Apache, MIT, GPL, etc...) taking copyright material, modifying, and redisting, with attribution is usually fair game. Now such a tradition doesn't exist in the book market, but again, I'm not sure if a lot of people know that.
Note, if the book he was writing was a parody of Zed's book, he may be protected by Fair Use law.
In any case, all this points to the fact that he made an innocent mistake. And what I've discovered is that people who make these types of mistakes, while embarrassed, usually are deferential, unless personally attacked ("only an idiot can do something so stupid").