Dear Gabor, Gary and I are very EMBARASSED by your findings and we wish to apologize to you and the entire PHP documentation team. There was never any intention to slight or misrepresent anyone for any reason. The PHP documentation you refer to was the first package we ever parsed for the ThoutReader. We were able to do so with relative ease because it was formatted and structured so well in the first place.
I do not wish to make any excuses because there are none. OSoft consists of two people, Gary Varnell and me. While we both have other jobs, the ThoutReaderT is our passion. We do not have the benefit of a collaborative team effort at this point because no one has volunteered to support our project yet. Most developers do appreciate what we are trying to do and that is rewarding enough for us. Were it not for the patient guidance of Zak Greant, who knows where we would be. He believes the ThoutReaderT has a lot of merit and deserves a chance to succeed. Through his tutelage, we changed our licensing to GPL. Just last week the Apache doc guys were very helpful and advised us about their copyright and licensing issues. Perhaps if we had more experience or greater resources to draw upon, we would get things right the first time and not offend anyone. But we are learning. : ) I am aware that the latest documentation release is 1-13-05 and we will not only update the content on our site but also push out the latest release to the people who downloaded the previous version. The offending PHP package has been removed from our site. We have parsed dozens of documents since our first experience and the results and capabilities of the packages get better and better. I will ENSURE that each package that goes out will be in full compliance before it is released. Ideally, we would like to give our PHP parser to the PHP documentation group. As you post new content, a click or two will convert your documentation into the ThoutReaderT format, regardless of the language. Thank you for your understanding, Mark Mark D. Carey President, OSoft.com "Mind Altering Software" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 253-284-0475 -----Original Message----- From: Gabor Hojtsy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2005 1:49 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; PHPdoc Subject: Re: [PHP-DOC] Re: Thout Reader Update and Link on PHP > And last, but absolutely not least, comes what I was definitely > disappointed about. You worked hard to find an acceptable license, and > was aware of licensing problems with the reader. But in your PHP manual, > THERE IS NO AUTHOR LIST AND NO COPYRIGHT INFORMATION! Forgive me for > shouting. But YOU COMPLETELY REMOVED ALL CREDIT AND LEGAL INFORMATION > FROM THE DOCUMENT! Yes, there is an appendix which you left untouched > and which is the direct copy of the license we built our license on, but > in its generality it is far from being our copyright statement, and very > far from being our author and contributor list. The fact that your > reader is now available under the GNU GPL 2 license does not make our > hearts warm if you remove our legal notes and the names of those, who > have done much for this document to be as it is today. Also you have this on your download page: php4 manual english Author: GNU Which is, well... Let me not say anything on this.... Seems like this document is quite outdated anyway: Posted: 07/27/2004 I myself appreciate your work, but republishing something always starts with looking at licensing, and you miserably failed in this regard. Gabor Hojtsy - PHP Documentation Editor
