"Please take this down and write your own book." • Hacker News Board

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#121

Post by aplusbi » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 9:43 PM UTC

brettbender wrote: post #32

Love the entitlement evident in his reply, "I'm a fucking Engine Yard programmer for fuck sake. We promote mongrel as a stable deployment stack" - does he think the fact that they promote zed's work means it's okay to ignore zed's rights regarding his own work? Also, how could anyone take issue with the maintainer of https://github.com/martinemde/dicks and http://dicks.heroku.com ?

I'm pretty sure Martin meant that respects and appreciates Zed's work as he uses mongrel, and that he was not in any way trying to be disrespectful to Zed in copying the book.

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#122

Post by sequoia » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 9:45 PM UTC

I think Zed's approach reflects an attitude like 'I shouldn't have to hold your hand re:copyright.'

I'm guessing Zed's rancor isn't just about this incident, but the 'net-wide confusion about copyright vs cc copyright vs gpl vs whatever, particularly among the newer generation of web developers (like me). I am sympathetic to his feeling of "I shouldn't even have to tell you this."

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#123

Post by xentronium » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 9:46 PM UTC

sblom wrote: post #116

Wow. I really want to be on Zed's side here, but while his message is 99% legit, his delivery leaves something to be desired.

Original author (martinemde) had good intentions but was stopped by a fact he was dealing with a douchebag.

Lesson #1: don't deal with douchebags.

Zed thinks he's making something of extraordinary quality that's going to suck when crowdsourced. I am 100% sure he's wrong because wikipedia is crowdsourced and wikipedia is awesome.

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#124

Post by cowboyhero » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 9:52 PM UTC

mathgladiator wrote: post #2

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.

Speaking of brands .. if I were the guys running Engine Yard I'd be reaaaaally pissed right about now.

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#125

Post by Semiapies » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 9:58 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #117

Semiapies wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not that's true, programmers who go for that approach need to be good at apologizing.

Zed over-reacted. Whatever harm martinemde did to Zed's book is close to nothing. Martinemde took down the derived book as soon as he got the request from Zed, who, while saying "please", also accompanied it with a couple insults.

Part of being good at apologizing is sucking it up and accepting anger from the people you piss off.

Don't go the "better to ask forgiveness" route if you're unwilling to accept some grief.

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#126

Post by kenjackson » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 10:01 PM UTC

ebneter wrote: post #111

kenjackson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* I, for one, appreciate someone who is so passionate about their work that they go to such lengths to defend it.* The ironic thing is that Zed's letter is similar to Bill Gates's letter to hobbyists 30 years, yet Bill has been historically flamed by the hacker community (requiring me to pay for software, is a larger crime than me stealing it). I wonder if identity politics play a larger role than ethical admiration.

Except that Zed has made lots of open source contributions -- just not this one. He does get to pick and choose how he wishes to release things.

I don't think anyone is arguing against what you're saying. It's the manner in which you do it. When I'm in the grcoery store and someone leaves their cart in the way I usually say, "You're blocking the path, could you move it?" Never had an issue. I could also say, "Jerkwad, would you move your cart, or continue to be a classless lowlife and I'll have someone from the store move it for you?"

I just find people to make such pronouncements to be over the top and people I generally would not associate with. And unfortunately there are people like that. It just felt like Zed trended that direction, IMO. And clearly it appears that many in HN think its perfectly acceptable.

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#127

Post by aplusbi » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 10:14 PM UTC

pmjordan wrote: post #48

mcknz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not at all -- just thought that was the only part that martinemde could possibly object to.

My money's on being caught red-handed at copyright infringement. Plus an unhealthy level of entitlement ( I'm a fucking Engine Yard programmer for fuck sake. )

The Engine Yard comment was meant to be taken as "I use your stuff (mongrel) and respect you. I had no intention of wronging you."

As for "being caught red-handed" it's a matter of intent. Martin didn't mean to wrong Zed, he was inspired by Zed but ultimately messed up (by assuming it was okay to modify the text).

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#128

Post by natep » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 10:14 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #27

charlief wrote: post #5

This was originally posted by martinemde looking for support and then flagged down here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873881

"I messaged you on Twitter and contacted you by email to try to give you knowledge of it. I was quite public about doing it as a _why day project. I made a good faith effort to let you know what I was working on. I even knew you were working on having a learn code the hard way thing and I wanted to contribute but there's no clear outline of your goals or how you expect people to contribute. This is my understanding o…

If the license clearly states you cannot modify the work, then you cannot modify the work. It doesn't matter how many times you contact the guy with no response, the license was there since the beginning.

And you're only pointing out one side of the story. The chain of reaction was (mostly paraphrased)

1. ignore license and author's express wishes 2. "please stop and have some class" 3. "Don't be upset at me, I thought I was doing what you wanted" 4. "Thanks for taking it down, here's why I feel this way" 5. "No, really, I did you a favor and you should thank me" 6. "Guys like you are the reason I stopped doing Ruby." 7. "I speak for everyone, "good fucking riddance."" 8. "Exactly. You guys are all about love, and then you scream obscenities at me. Half-finished crap doesn't help me. I went out of my way to help people make a similar book [not sure about the timing, but he has], and you went and did things the opposite way" 9. Everybody else piles in

Now, I may have taken too many editorial liberties, but that's how I saw the conversation.

TL;DR - if you ask permission to violate someone's license and don't get an answer, that does not mean "Yes"

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#129

Post by aplusbi » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 10:16 PM UTC

tvon wrote: post #43

rbanffy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I messaged you on Twitter and contacted you by email to try to give you knowledge of it. I was quite public about doing it as a _why day project. I made a good faith effort to let you know what I was working on. I even knew you were working on having a learn code the hard way thing and I wanted to contribute but there's no clear outline of your goals or how you expect people to contribute. This is my understanding o…

> It seems he tried contact and was ignored. I don't think silence is consent in this case. The whole thing seems like an obviously bad idea to me...

I don't think Martin was trying to ask for permission. It seems to me that he assumed it would be okay to do this, and wanted to let Zed know that his work was appreciated.

Re: "Please take this down and write your own book."

#130

Post by aplusbi » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 10:19 PM UTC

Semiapies wrote: post #81

sp4rki wrote: post #75

Why are a lot of people missing stuff like this: "have some class and use your own words and write your own book" and this "Guys like you are the reason I stopped doing Ruby"? I agree with Zed that the idea was borderline useless since both languages have their ways and a direct translation lacks focus anyway. I also agree that it's Zed's work, and he granted use of his work with a license which doesn't allow this ty…

When you act in a classless way, whether that's making fart noises in a restaurant or plagiarizing someone's work, you risk the pain of being told to act with more class.

This wasn't plagiarism. At no point did Martin attempt to pass this off as his own work. This was an homage, very much in the spirit of open source - the only problem was that the book is not open source.