I understand where you're coming from and appreciate your sentiments.
If you look at my site you'll see I put out a lot of free stuff, and I
get personal satisfaction out of helping other developers.
But when someone else makes claim -- not via reworking your ideas into
something better but by directly copying your work, putting their own
name on it and pretending via silence that its their own -- then that is
universally recognized as thievery. As was pointed out by another
poster, such activity is generally grounds for immediate dismissal in
the academic world, which is also dedicated to learning and the free
flow of information, as is our developer community.
And what do I get out of this? Developers come to me for help.
Sometimes several in a day (ugh :-)). Either on one of my free tags or
on general subjects. Not that I like to advertise it but I try to help
everyone who asks. For free ... And some come back to me with
additional jobs that pay money.
I would guess that over time this has slowly crept up from zero to half
my income. Bottom line is we live in a commercial world. I donate a
lot of my time, but I also get commercial benefit from it. Didn't start
out that way, but I'm grateful for it and most importantly **I** earned
it.
Further consider that Peter Tilbrook made a gross misrepresentation
about what had happened in his post on this thread.
He said:
>...[I]... either neglected to
>properly quite [sic] an original author or the fell by the wayside with
the
>conversion to HTML for the actual tutorial.
Well, they were in html in the first place. And in one case (the
Unicode tutorial) he took the trouble to snip out my linked offer of
additional help ... and my personal signature. Whats the excuse for
that bit? Never mind. Rhetorical question.
And is copying an entire article, its code, comments etc. and putting
his name on it "neglecting to properly quote" someone? Ridiculous and,
I'm sure, seen as such by the audience.
Finally bear in mind that a $3,000 prize is up for grabs at easycfm.com,
for the most popular tutorial (or somesuch... I wasn't aware of it
before this). What do you suppose would have happened with that prize
money if he had won?
Does Peter Tilbrook deserve any part of the recognition, however small
or immaterial, that comes from my efforts through thievery? Let him
write his own material and publish it; come up with his own ideas... But
if he steals them from others he can expect what he gets when he is
caught.
That's it for me. I've spoken my piece on this.
--------------------------------------------
Matt Robertson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
MSB Designs, Inc. http://mysecretbase.com
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