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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

This is a good illustration of how tone doesn't come across well in writing. Reading the comment by the original author, it sounded like a friendly request to please take the content down.

The guy whose site it was clearly didn't see it that way and responded as though he'd been viscously attacked. He ends up coming across as quite angry, when more likely he was just rattled and feeling defensive.

I guess the takeaway is to always take a step back before responding when you feel attacked. Chances are you're not being attacked nearly as harshly as you think.

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It's Zed Shaw. That pretty much rules out it being a friendly request ;)

With that said, such situations are exactly the sort that mildly unfriendly requests are appropriate for. I did the same thing when someone took my BSD licensed code, replaced my name in the copyright notice with his own, and put it up on github. Fundamentally, you're not making a request, you're giving a command.

And he didn't even involve a lawyer, so he's already doing the guy a favor.

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 writing, and for others reading such a book would be a valuable experience.

I think if Zed would have just said:

"Hi, my book isn't public domain. You can't modify and redist w/o permission. And unfortunately, I don't think Ruby is the type of language you can just drop in as a replacement for Python. You may get the result to work, but it'll be suboptimal for Ruby and may even make my original text look worse as a result.

Ther eare some people working on a clean room version with Ruby. If you're interested, I'd be happy to make an introduction for you. Again, I'll have to ask you to cease using my text for this project, but hopefully you can create a great Ruby book in some other manner." Or something similar, the result would have been a more civil dialog.

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 the original notice and then a mere "thanks for taking it down". (speaking as someone who has no emotional involvement in the situation, anyway. Who knows how I would have reacted to that level of abuse)

> In fact, many people get extra annoyed when you're nice about this sort of thing.

My guilty pleasure at work is reading support emails. There are a few gems like that in the system.

That's a different ball game. Support people are often extremely nice when they aren't fixing something that they should be fixing (although in some cases it's not possible). Being nice doesn't address the fact that I just lost two years worth of data.

I think parent was referring to incarnations of point 4 of this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

I disagree. Frankly many people don't understand copyright law. Ask average Joe on the street what is Fair Use and most people don't have a clue. The Ruby guy didn't seem to know he was violating Fair Use, if so he likely wouldn't have called "Learn Ruby the Hard Way", and probably would make it more difficult to find for people that read the Python version, especially the author himself.

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").

Speculation about interpretation and motives notwithstanding:

Not knowing the ins and outs of copyright law and licensing is neither excuse nor reason to blow up at a takedown request. Innocent mistake or not.

The parody and citation exemptions would presumably not allow verbatim lifting of large sections of prose, though. (presumably hence "may")

Based on the thread following the initial reaction they probably both owe each other an apology.

A learning exercise, maybe, but "porting" this book to Ruby is a bad idea. Ruby isn't Python, and it's "Learn Python the Hard Way", not "Learn Programming the Hard Way". It's a book tailored to a specific language, and created to teach that language... which is the point Zed makes.

Had Python simply been the language used to teach basic programming concepts, then yeah, I could understand. While I haven't read LPTHW, if it had a section on, say, threading and the GIL - then simply porting the demo code to Ruby would at best be confusing, and at worst thoroughly put a programmer off Ruby.

The guy has a dong api... class defense fail. https://github.com/martinemde/dicks

Given the circumstances I thought Zed was reasonably civil.

Totally agree. Trying to get a hold of someone, then assuming permission when they don't respond isn't ok. I'd be pissed to...

I would ask the person to take it down and that would be it. Zed asked, then insulted. Insulting people is not a good way to win someone's cooperation.

Why would Shaw need to win Edme's cooperation?

Why would he need anyone's cooperation since he's so fucking awesome? I don't know.

I prefer to have other people's cooperation.

"I think what you did was classless. I think you should try again, but with class"

If I said that to you, would you be insulted? I said nothing about your character, and if anything, he was being encouraging.

And then, you're pissed at Zed calling them hippies, after telling him "good fucking riddance" and displaying exactly the behavior that he defines as being a hippie ("all about the love, except when you're not" - conveniently defined in the same sentence)?

It would be one thing if the class thing was actually an insult, or if Zed hadn't made his wishes clear in the license.

So, seriously, what is so insulting about the whole 'class' line?

Your response was really idiotic.

How do you feel about this statement?

Of course, I didn't mean it - your statement is very well reasoned, but when Zed turned his interests towards the Python language and the largely civilized community around it, I worried that his behaviour could become, if not the norm, a trend. I have strong ties to this community and my work largely depends on its health.

Zed's divisive. No community needs divisive people. Code is less important than being able to play with others.

I'm probably not normal, but my first reaction was "uh oh, what did I say? Was this another comment I made on little sleep and without thinking?" I was actually a little disappointed that my response wasn't idiotic, because now I can't learn what was idiotic about it.

Ultimately, you are right that Zed is divisive, possibly because he's taken "you can't please everybody" too far, and I wouldn't want any significant number of people to have Zed's personality, even though I tend to take his side on topics I know anything about.

Frankly, the older I get, the more respect I have for the guy.

A lot of folks would have responded with a lawyer or at least a legal nastygram. Zed didn't even mention the law, just asked (asked!) the guy to take it down, and took the time to refute and explain all the guy's misconceptions.

> Frankly, the older I get, the more respect I have for the guy.

I lost a great deal of respect for him over his Debian rant. He was making up really weird accusations and calling for actions completely out of proportion to the perceived "offenses".

I think it's easy to do the rant thing, but the older I get, the less I like it, and the more respect I have for people who display some civility and moderation, and save the real anger for those things in life that merit it (hint: they mostly don't involve computers).

Or, when someone's pointing out that you're wronging him, don't even worry about interpretation of tone. Worry about whether you've done something wrong, and if you have, then 1) fix it, 2) apologize, and finally 3) don't do that again.

"Make excuses" and "berate the person for being angered by your wrongdoing" are not on this list.

"How dare that person care more than I think he should."

"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?

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).

Taken in isolation, that might appear over the top, but as you can see from subsequent comments by martin on that thread and his attempts to elicit symapthy on HN by posting an inflammatory post [1] and tweeting about it [2], martin has clearly shown who has less class here.

On the contrary, Zed has chosen not broadcast this to the wide world though he is clearly the "injured" party here.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873881 [2] http://twitter.com/#!/martinemde/status/589562699063297

"If you want to write a similar book for Ruby then have some class and use your own words and write your own book."

I'd say that's harsh, and unnecessary. I'd feel attacked if that was directed at me, too, especially if I felt (rightly or not) that I'd kept things on the level.

No one needs to be polite, especially when they feel the need to protect their work. But in not doing so, they belie a certain amount of lack of empathy.

It's a shame posts like this get upvoted for the drama and this behavior is rewarded.

How many times have you written a nice and polite words when the fruit of your passionate labor has been taken without your consent and dealt with in a way that you consider inappropriate ?

I've once had, and I can fully understand Zed, maybe, did experience a certain emotion in it.

If I were to deal with a similar situation coldly without a drama and emotion, I'd simply spend $6 (or how much the registered mail costs?), sent a DMCA takedown notice, and be done with it.

In any case - the real drama and theatre happens in the comments to the original communication.

Some guy made a mistake. Zed has asked to take it down. He took it down. The fact whether Zed has asked it with a twist or not, is o(1) compared to the quality of the subsequent comments on that page. That part is a real shame, in my opinion.

(edit: re-reading your comment, maybe I have misunderstood it - re. the fact that the done-with matters are promoted on HN "for the sake of drama" - well, as soon as we all remain civil and try to not step over each others' toes, I do not think it is a problem - and is actually a good case study. As soon as noone starts to throw tomatoes into some folk who happened to make an honest mistake and quickly corrected it.)

I see what you're saying, but... it's copyright infringement and license violation. Politeness is not a requirement.

I think the bigger takeaway is that martinemde should've realized he was in the wrong.

And when you wrong people, sometimes they say mean things in response. Sometimes (often), you should just suck it up and say nothing more than "Yes, I was wrong to do this. I'm sorry."

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