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Comment by charlief | Hacker News Reader

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

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"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 of what you'd expect for contribution."

I tend to support the martinemde here. It seems he tried contact and was ignored. As much as Zed's coding skills are respected (I never looked into his code myself, but I trust my peers) I have to wonder if they are worth his toxicity.

"have some class", "guys like you are the reason I stopped doing Ruby", "Ruby hippie"... Come on...

> 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 suppose most programmers find it better to ask for forgiveness then for permission.

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.

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.

"An equally important part is to refrain from doing it"

No, that would be closer to the "asking permission" philosophy.

It's better to ask for forgiveness, but asking permission, when feasible and practical (Zed ignored the guy, after all) is nice.

So the steps you really suggest are:

1) Ask permission.

2) If you don't get permission, do it anyway.

3) Complain and berate the people you crossed if you suffer consequences from doing it anyway.

Gah. I think I've had quite enough of talking with you.

Not exactly.

1- ask for permission

2- if you don't get an answer, assume the subject is not that important to the person you asked

3- Do it

4- If person who ignored you denies you permission retroactively, comply

5- Complain when the person who ignored you and then denied you permission to do what you already did, which you promptly removed from public access, also insults you for no reason beyond not getting his attention in the first place.

I think that covers it very thoroughly.

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.

"You didn't respond to me" does not lead to "I can do what I want with material you post". Good faith means honoring people's wishes until they tell you otherwise.

Aside: Normally I look for something like O'Reilly's statement "This book is to help you get your job done." The code is gone, so I can't tell where this would fall on the reasonableness continuum.

Aside Aside: Zed's a nice guy in person; I'd guess the harsh online stuff is a tool to get things done. Linus doesn't have a rep. for being nice online, and perhaps that's how some guys put out so much code.

I don't know Zed in person, but the harshness presented online is excessive. While I agree Linus can drive many programmers to tears I can't remember him calling anyone a hippie or saying someone lacks class.

Try this: http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/6/17/250

and this: http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/6/17/254

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"

> If the license clearly states you cannot modify the work

Is a translation a modified version of the original or a new, although derived, work? Two good lawyers could debate this issue until the universe cools down. We shouldn't.

Perhaps because of the provocative title. I actually think that it shows even less class from martinemde, that he posted that himself.

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