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Subject:RE: HUMOR: I Need Help From:Jim Shaeffer <jims -at- spsi -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 19 Feb 2001 12:25:34 -0500
See Original message, below.
1. Yes. Claiming anything proprietary as your own work is right out (Monty
Python and the Holy Grail).
2. You say, 'Sure they recycle code. But they have other means of obtaining
it.' I think that therein lies the rub (Shakespeare).
Many Technical Communicators look around and find a paucity of other means.
Example: Daytona Beach is not a hotbed of programming, yet our Barnes &
Noble has several shelves of Visual Basic books, most of them advertising a
CD-ROM full of sample programs and code. There is nothing remotely
comparable for Technical Writing.
I am _not_ trying to encourage the type of post that Andrew parodied in his
original message.
I am suggesting that such posts may be, in part, symptoms of organizational
and system problems, not just symptoms of personal laziness.
Footnote on recycling code: As Stephen J. Owens points out, the practical
difficulties of code re-use can be immense. But, even setting aside the idea
of 'wholesale copying', we Technical Writers do not seem to have access to
the wealth of samples that programmers seem to have.
Jim Shaeffer
jims -at- spsi -dot- com
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Swallow [mailto:bill_swallow -at- yahoo -dot- com]
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 8:36 AM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: RE: HUMOR: I Need Help
But do they enter a room full of 3000+ people and
shout "anyone got some code I can swipe and claim for
my own work"? No. And that is essentially what you are
doing by asking this forum for templates and other
work. Sure, they recycle code. But they have other
means of obtaining it. Plus, I've never seen a
programmer grab a chunk of proprietary code and reuse
it without some re-engineering. Only a stupid
programmer would do that, as it'd be too easy for the
original author to detect and retaliate.
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