I’m not sure whether to be upset or happy about this. I guess I’m mostly upset.
Just last month, an enterprising person in India decided to put up a blog about MariaDB and MySQL. My guess is the purpose behind the blog was to show that the person was a skilled MariaDB and MySQL user, after all, look at all the blog posts they “wrote”! All 28 posts currently present on the blog went up on 11-12 March, which would have been a Herculean feat if they had actually written all (any?) of them.
I was just made aware of the site today, and after some looking at least eleven of the 28 posts are direct copies from my Getting Started with MariaDB book. The other posts were either original, or came primarily from other sources, my bet is the latter though I admit I didn’t make any effort to find out.
So normally, as the author, I should be steamed about this, and a big part of me is. It took a long time to write those words. There’s figurative blood, literal sweat, and semi-literal tears that went into the writing of that book. On the other hand though, wow, I’m worth copying. Pretty cool to have reached that point in my career.
On the other hand, it’s a poor copy. Some posts end right in the middle of a section, include references to other chapters in the book which don’t make sense on the blog, and so on. It’s a poor copy. I mean, sure, I’m upset about this person lifting substantial sections verbatim from my book, but couldn’t they at least have done a decent job of it? Insult to injury, indeed.
In the end, copying someone else’s work without their permission and then trying to pass it off as your own is wrong, and so I’ve issued a DMCA takedown request to Google (it was a Blogger-powered blog). Hopefully the infringing posts will be deleted soon.
P.S. If you’re really hurting for MariaDB content, there’s plenty of it at https://mariadb.com/kb and it’s available to copy under a Creative Commons license!
How crazy!!