Zed Shaw does not want Ruby in His book

Interesting statistic: The only curse words used in this entire thread came from the repository owner and not from Zed Shaw.

Also, I flagged this and just realized the repository owner is the one who posted this to HN. My apologies, but you really should be more careful with your words.

It is his book and he can do whatever he wants with it.

You are being overly aggressive and acting as a victim here.

You did copy his book without permission and now you are acting as if he went out of his way to insult you.

This book is not open source licensed even though the source is open. YOU could have been gracious and said, "oops, no problem" and taken down the book.

Instead, you wrote a much, much nastier reply and now you have created a post on HN with inflammatory and misleading title.

You are the one that is coming off as the bad person here.

FWIW, I flagged this post. This kind of melodrama does not belong here.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1739383

Well, it isn't.

There was a link on HN yesterday (as well as on reddit and presumably a good many other sources) which had to do with an author who discovered that their article on cooking had been copied from the web, edited, and published in a magazine - all without the original authors permission. When confronted, the magazine editor simply stated that the web is public domain, so they were within their rights to do what they did. They were also wrong.

When a person creates practically anything, regardless of if or how they publish it, that person owns the copyright to his or her work. It's illegal for someone to simply come along and edit the work and publish it. That's called plagiarism, and students get suspended or expelled from educational institutions every year for it.

You could have erroneously assumed that the work was open for modification because it was on GitHub, as I'm sure many projects on public hosting tend to be. The problem is that what makes these projects that was is the license they're released under (e.g. GPL, etc.) which give explicit permission to you to make such modifications. From what I see here, Zed has given no such permission, so what you did was wrong.

Further, Zed didn't appear to be angry with you in his first comment. He simply wanted to inform you that you had erred, and to request that you take steps to remedy the situation. Zed can come off as angry by default, so it was fairly obvious to me that he was really trying to be civil about the matter. Your response was to immediately go on the defensive ("Hey man, no need to be upset").

You then go on to suggest that "if [you] refused to take it down after [Zed's] first request then [Zed should] point out how it's illegal." Might I point out that this is exactly what he did, only consolidated? He requested you take it down, and gave you the reasons (illegality) all in one shot. He was more than fair to you, and you responded in anger.

I'd suggest that you apologize for both your actions and your tone. If you're looking for sympathy for your actions, and the response you've received, I'm afraid I can offer you none.

I think Zed Shaw does not want his book plagiarized -- simple as that and has nothing to do with what language is being swapped in.

Zed's totally right, in this case:

> The languages and the feel are both totally different, and your rendition of the book would have been confusing and crap.

Not to mention

> the key here is that I didn't give you permission in the first place.

Now, this is slightly confusing, since Zed is offering to let other people use his branding to make "Learn X the Hard Way" books, so it's understandable that someone could get confused. But that doesn't make it right.

The dude who copied the book does seem like a baby in the GitHub dialog. Zed doesn't want you copying his book. Get over it and don't get so defensive and abusive.

There are people that think this way? Programmers?