| Gunnar Ritter 2005-05-06, 6:02 pm |
| Rich Teer wrote:
> For the record, I (being said author) refute any and all claims of
> plagiarism. Yes, there are some similarities between my book and
> APUE. As I've said in the past, they are intentional, imitation
> being the sincerest form of flattery. But there are also MANY
> differences (my book is almost twice the size of APUE, so there'd
> have to be!).
APUE is not the only material to which passages of your book have
a similarity on a word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence level. Here
is an example involving a Solaris manual page:
| Note that the alloca function is very machine-, compiler-, and
| system dependent; its use is strongly discouraged. [your book,
| page 99]
vs.
| The alloca() function is machine-, compiler-, and most of all,
| system-dependent. Its use is strongly discouraged. [Solaris 8
| malloc(3C)]
The origin of this passage can be traced back to SunOS 4 at least.
How does it come that your book contains the same three adjectives
in the same order as well as the same second clause in its entirety?
> My publisher is aware of Dickey's allegations, and has investigated
> the matter. As far as they are concerned, it is a non-issue; and
> my book is published by the same company as APUE. So as far as the
> copyright holders are concerned, there is no plagiarism; and that's
> good enough for me.
Is this to mean that you deny the relevance of ethic standards in this
area?
> Naturally, I reserve the right to persue any legal action I chose
> against Dickey, for his slanderous/libellous allegations, and his
> tarnishing of my good name and reputation, and any loss of earnings
> due to that. So does my publisher...
You really consider to discuss the material from
<http://invisible-island.net/critique/APUE-SSP.html> in court?
> I guess he's (Dickey) just some Net Kook he enjoys stiring the brown
> stuff. Personally, I ignore him.
Perhaps you should make a habit of doing a Google web search for the
names of persons before guessing about them. Thomas has provided
excellent services to the Unix community for over a decade with his
maintenance and development of xterm, ncurses, etc. There is hardly
anybody in these groups who has never used the Open Source software
Thomas has donated to the community; many do so daily, and many do so
just in the very moment they are reading these lines.
In this case, he has compiled enough material to fill a large web
page. You will not defeat that by guesses ad hominem.
Gunnar
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