Scribbling feverishly on April 04, David A. Bandel managed to emit: > On Wed, 3 Apr 2002 22:43:17 -0500 > begin Marvin Dickens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> spewed forth: > > [snip] > > > But then again, what do I know...?... Kurt and David B. are better > > equipped than I am at this sort of thing.
Indeed. When I was working on one of my books, I spent a week rewriting a chapter on a set of function call interfaces because one of the reviewers noticed that in some places, I had inadvertently parroted the manual pages. This was disconcerting to me and the editors, but not a surprise -- I *had* to look at the manual pages (most of which are covered under the GPL) for complete details and to make sure I didn't butcher the description. On the other hand, there are only so many ways to explain, for example, that a system call returns 0 if it succeeds and -1 if an error occurs (in which case it sets errno). > Could you look around and find something that looks similar? YES > Is it plagiarism? NO > > Why not, it looks and reads like someone else's material? > > Because in the case of a cook-book recipe like the above where certain > steps are involved, must be accomplished in a certain order, they will > _always_ look like someone else's cookbook recipe to do exactly the same > thing, copied or not. Precisely. [le chop] > Fiction is a lot easier to prove plagiarism than technical writing. (Just > how many ways are there to screw in a light bulb?) You just need to say > in good conscience that you did not copy someone else's work. And, when in doubt, identify your source. Kurt -- You have a deep interest in all that is artistic. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
