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

Two things:

1) It was not plagiarizing, it was copyright infringement, and they are both not mutually inclusive and are completely different. Martin didn't appropriate the content or idea of the book and called it his own, he publish the start of an attempt of a 'book hack' stating the original author and intent.

2) Do you equate fart noises with a person making a mistake in the name of providing something useful to the community? The dude made a mistake, a mistake that in no way reflects on his amount of class, but does reflect on his drive to provide something useful to the Open Source community. Sure he should be corrected, as he did make a mistake, but he should not be degraded in any way as has been done in this case.

PD: Who has more class, the person who farts in a restaurant, or the person that calls him on it publicly without knowing the reasons for him doing it and does so with intent to degrade such person?

An equally important part is to refrain from doing it when you think the other part would be gravely offended. As Martin explained, he was paying homage to Zed. Instead of trying to understand the reasons someone would like to homage him, Zed insulted Martin.

When I ask someone to take down a plagiarized version of something I wrote (it happens) I usually point out I do not license the material on my site. I don't call people names not I insult them - I just point out they shouldn't do it and urge them to take the content down because it's not fine with me they reuse it. Even that is rare - I am usually happy with adequate attribution.

I can't understand why someone talented as Zed feels a need to insult people. But that's me and I am not like him.

You're trying to wrap all this up in justifications of what he did this "in the name of".

How someone justifies something like this is irrelevant. The basic rule for material, absent an explicit other license, is copyright. Shaw is generous enough to offer a less restrictive license, but that license is clear on its terms. To ignore the license given on a work, whether it's copyright, some CC non-commercial variant, GPL, or whatever is indeed a classless act.

And if you want to linger on "providing something useful", Zed has pointed out and Martin acknowledged that this approach is not useful for advancing Ruby education. (For that matter, it was a dead project.) Shaw has now provided a guide on how to make a book of this style at http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1288945508.html

Also, it's "make fart noises", not "fart". As in deliberately make a noise considered rude. Copying and pasting a book and putting it in a public repository isn't a semi-voluntary bodily function.

I call bullshit. Text can be perfectly expressive, in fact often more expressive than other media. You just need to be able to write well - and e-mail has exposed us on a daily basis to the fact that most people haven't figured out how to write and communicate very well.

Obligatory plug - I wrote about this recently: http://blog.tommorris.org/post/1307196373/im-getting-absolut...

Nice way to promote your own blog.

Quote: "Do the people who propose these theories not get letters in the post? Do they not send each other Christmas cards?:

See - that's the part that shows that you fail to understand the problem. At all. I can send my mum, my SO or my brother short notices - and they will get what I mean. Because they already know me. They know my style of talking, my sense of humor and my way to argue. I'm not going to send you a christmas card over the internet, without previous encounters.

See - if you present this text of yours here, I'm lost. Are you _serious_ about that "bullshit"? I'm not sure. I don't know you and it doesn't make much sense to me. Either you are serious and we have to disagree a lot and I just don't (so far) get what your problem with my position is, or you just make a joke. Maybe you are chuckling in your chair and just want to spread some HN link love. Maybe you actually DO believe that emotions and intents are clearly visible in text.

If the last point is true I wonder if you had any classes/lessons where you were told to determine the authors intention - and if you have enough confidence to claim that yes, you knew _exactly_ what Mark Twain was trying to tell you in each of his books.

Er - I guess that was a long way to say: I call bullshit on both your argumentation and your motives. Feel free to read this with the image of me being amused, bewildered, confused, angry, annoyed or just neutral. Have fun.