Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

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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)

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.

> 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

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

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