From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2002-05-19T18:21:20+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Programmierung in Ruby

On Fri, 17 May 2002, Juergen Katins wrote:

> Dear Dave
> Being three years old my daughter will still stay at home for a long
> time. But I am aware of the day our baby will leave home to discover
> the wild world, to visit foreign countries and to make new friends we
> will never set our eyes on.
> Your baby is leaving home now!

This opening statement is without doubt the most unpleasant thing I
have ever read or heard anyone in the Ruby community say to anyone
else in the Ruby community.

It's not clear to me how you became the intellectual property _pater
familias_, the arbiter of what's right and what's wrong on behalf of
the rest of us.  That, of course, is the implication of your obnoxious
metaphor: a book's "leaving home" means that it has rebeled against
its license and is ready to have *you* decide what should happen to
it.

But it's hardly worth discussing the metaphor seriously, when clearly
your purpose is simply to express contempt for Dave.

> I did want to avoid just the same difficulties Dave is struggling with
> now! I changed to the more restrictive GPDL to garantee my translation
> and any derived works to stay free.

I believe that you have not changed the license.  I see nothing in the
OPL to support the claim that your translation is not OPL'd.  I
maintain that all you have done is obscure the license, by deleting
the required wording and inserting irrelevant wording pertaining to a
different, inapplicable license.

> If my translation should be retranslated and return to the USA that
> returning version will be a free one.

I'm surprised that you would try to predict something like this, given
your evident belief in the translator's right to change license
terms.

> I visualize the bad example of "Addison-Wesley Verlag" Germany
> publishing their translation under totally closed licence. I
> absolutely dont want to let something like that happen with my
> translation.

I imagine that neither the authors nor AWL wanted "something like" the
claim of a non-OPL'd translation to "happen" to the book -- which is
presumably why they took the trouble to OPL it.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav