(day three) - your opinion on the new design needed

[Kurt Wall]

Scribbling feverishly on April 04, David A. Bandel managed to emit:
> On Wed, 3 Apr 2002 22:43:17 -0500
> begin  Marvin Dickens <peck_d at bellsouth.net> 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.