Documentation plagiarism

meta
1

I wanted to learn more about mail servers. As in how postfix work, how to modify the configurations and how to inbox your mails. MIAB has definitely gotten me started with it and now I was ready to learn more.

So decided to read in depth and eventually stumbled across this book on amazon:
https://amzn.to/2vF8z9c. The author has cleverly mentioned to help us setup our own mail servers in order to learn it as well as use it for marketing. Little did I know (didn’t read the description before purchasing, my bad :expressionless:), that it was nothing but a setup guide to MIAB itself.

I was baffled as MIAB is an open source project and is already provided with a very well maintained documentation and setup guide along with a video setup guide. The only difference was the use of serverpoint.com for VPS (instead of DO) and Putty for SSH (which is on Windows unlike Ubuntu on MIAB setup guide). Rest everything was identical. Not to mention the grammatical mistakes that came along with it. I had to pay for this book. I consider this a serious case of Documentation plagiarism. Of course I don’t want to enter into any sort of conflict. But I felt disappointed and thought of sharing this on the forum. Please let me know what you guys think.

2

That’s funny! It’s just a verbatim copy of our documentation? Would you mind posting an image/screenshot of the content of the book?

I don’t really mind that this exists. You might object that you paid $$ for something that was free and better elsewhere, but that’s between you, the author, and Amazon. Mail-in-a-Box is public domain software so there’s no legal reason why this shouldn’t be.

For posterity I’m pasing a screenshot from Amazon:

image
image.png937×817 287 KB

3
Ignore.

There is a legal issue here, even with open source software, you cannot just “sell” a CC0 work:

A Work made available under CC0 may be
protected by copyright and related or neighboring rights (“Copyright and
Related Rights”)

Per the CC0 license your project is under (including documentation) this author CANNOT sell what he is selling if it is in fact just a copy-paste of your work…

EDIT: RE: Previous Comment

4

That is completely false.

5

Yea, in the US I suppose you could sell CC0 work without legal ramifications. I’ll modify my comment then.