discuss: hijacking someone else's howto
Subject:
Re: hijacking someone else's howto
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
25 Jun 2003 17:19:20 -0000
Message-Id: <20030625173121.GA546@lafn.org>
On Wed, Jun 25, 2003 at 08:14:16AM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> the hebrew howto was last updated 8 years ago.
>
> its content is completely out of date and useless. in fact, someone
> reading the howto will be hindered in their efforts to use hebrew on
> linux.
>
> i have contacted its author and all the people listed in the credits.
> nearly all addresses bounced. the ones that didn't yielded no reply.
>
> this howto is cruft. it serves no purpose to either tldp or linux users
> other than wasting disk space and showing us what things were like back
> in 1995.
>
> i've been thinking of updating the howto. before i take on such a large
> undertaking, i want to know what will happen to my submission to
> tldp.org. obviously, i'm not going to do anything if there's a chance
> my work will not be accepted.
If the licenses permits modification, then there's no problem.
Otherwise you would need to write another HOWTO on the same topic from
scratch. You can't copy parts of the old one nor paraphrase sentences
from the old one. Facts are not copyrightable but the method and
organization of expressing facts is. So your new HOWTO should be
based in part on new "facts" and completely rewritten and reorganized.
You could read over material on the subject, including the old HOWTO and
then write a HOWTO on this topic based on your notes and memory without
looking at the old HOWTO. The name could be say Hebrew-2-HOWTO to
distinguish it from the original.
David Lawyer
