From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2006-05-16T13:00:36+09:00 Subject: Re: Ticked Off On 5/15/06, Elliot Temple wrote: > On May 15, 2006, at 3:26 PM, Logan Capaldo wrote: > > On May 15, 2006, at 5:06 PM, Austin Ziegler wrote: > I am sympathetic to your annoyance. I don't think it is OK to suggest/ > advocate downloading ruby books in the IRC channel or on this mailing > list: most readers here can afford to buy programming books; it's bad > to advocate illegal activities in public; free documentation, > tutorials, source code, advice, etc is available; and it's > discourteous to authors who regularly give free help here. But is > every case of piracy deserving of the same great scorn? I realise > this may be a tangential issue, but if someone can't afford a book > and is not going to buy it either way, whom has he harmed by > downloading it? This person wasn't advocating permantly stealing David's book. He was advocating a "try it before you buy it" approach. The problem is that Manning took a risk by making a PDF copy of "Ruby for Rails" available for purchase. I believe that they made the right choice in doing so, but asinine approaches like this advocacy -- when sample chapters are made available for a reason, and the book will now soon be available in bookstores for perusing -- will only discourage Manning and other publishers from doing what they should do, and it will discourage other authors from following the same path as David did. I won't pretend that I'm pissed off at every example of "piracy" (I hate the term's abuse that way, but it does have currency), but it's advocacy of immoral and illegal behaviour. It just so happens that I know David and am that much more annoyed by this nonsense. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca