I’ve been working on a programming language for a while, and this is one of the key bits of advice I’ve had in the back of my mind during that time.
People have come along and contributed occasionally, but for the most part, I’m doing everything: writing the compiler, standard library, documentation, editor integration, blog posts, evangelism of the programming paradigm, and so on. Despite the fact that I don’t scale, I’ll happily sit down with someone who’s trying out the language, help them get up to speed, and fix all the bugs and usability issues they report. It’s that kind of connection to people that not only drives interest in the project, but drives me to stay motivated.
I can’t say I fully understand my own success…or even whether it’s success. I’m not selling anything, just making the language I want to use. Maybe a few hundred lines of code have been written in the language by someone other than me. I’ve accumulated >450 stars on GitHub for a product that doesn’t even do anything yet. It’s certainly surreal, but it’s been pleasant. :)
Thanks—only reason I didn’t mention it was that I didn’t feel the need to advertise. I mainly wanted to give my thoughts on how this article’s advice has been a positive thing for the project—seeking out users and taking measures to help them and make them happy directly.
For our first 100 customers we basically did all the setup work for them. Basically did a screenshare, clicked for them, told them what to do. Would sometimes leave the call, and spend 1-8 hours clicking for the customer.
Learned how customers wanted the product to work, and gained initial customers. Lost money on the setup but who cares.
Now setups are a 30 minute phone call where we teach customers how to click themselves.
Curious, what software did you use for screen sharing? were customers ok with this?
Was your app so complex that you couldn't guide them through the phone or it was a deficiency in the UX/UI of the app?
> Curious, what software did you use for screen sharing
Started off with Join.me. I then threw out my windows PC and installed Ubuntu, so it stopped working. I did appear.in a few times, but the quality stunk. Mostly moved to my setup team, that mostly still uses join.me.
> were customers ok with this
Oh they loved it. The competition is "Here is a youtube video and some docs, have at it". We actually took the time to get to know our customer and dive in, help them navigate the setup etc.
> Was your app so complex that you couldn't guide them through the phone or it was a deficiency in the UX/UI of the app?
Both! Necessary complexity is high, but so is accidental. Working on reducing accidental a little every day. Not willing to kill off too many features in the name of simplicity, but willing to at least make the common path a lot easier to use.
Spent a month in university libraries handing out candy and asking groups of students to try out our sharing platform. We then would take what we learned that day and code changes/fixes before we left or when we got home so we could go out again in the morning.
Nearly every one of your Medium posts could be interpreted as a copyright violation. Copy pasting text and calling it a "curation" doesn't give you the right to publish others' works without their permission.
No. One of the tenets of the "fair use" standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substan...) is that the more of a work you reproduce within your own, the less likely it is that your reproduction is actually fair use. This is true whether or not you cite the author of the work you're reproducing.
The idea is to give people who just want to quote a line or two leeway to do so, while punishing those who would take someone else's work en masse and publish it under their own name.
Acadmic citation guidelines have little to do with copyright (for example, my university requires me to cite public domain works -- despite there being no copyright on said works).
Most citations or reasonable quotations fall under fair use, but reproducing an entire work (and/or modifying it) fall under copyright infringement.
> How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.
[snip]
> On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.
The point is, people understand plagiarism, and they universally think it to be wrong. People want copyright law to enforce that social norm, not understanding that plagiarism isn't something the law cares about; copyright law is somewhat related, but it is mostly orthogonal to it, and there's no other law which even defines the concept. Therefore, people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. After all, real lawyers use forms of words to do things, so why shouldn't my magic be similarly efficacious?
> people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless.
Yeah, silly people. Remember email in the early 1990's? It was clear that copying email messages from disk to memory, and memory to frame buffer, constituted copyright "copies". And that no implicit grant of permission existed. So after Berne, unless there was an explicit grant in an email, copying it from disk to screen was a copyright violation. Various organizations attached footers to outgoing emails stating the terms under which they could be used, but most didn't. And yet silly, silly people - they just ignored the legalities and continued reading their emails each morning. It's like they thought they could just do something reasonable, establish a societal norm, and copyright law would eventually adapt to it. Silly people. Oh, and forwarding, without distribution right! And display, without performance right. And more recently, Pinterest! So, people have been confused for decades. So many people just don't understand how the law works, and how it evolves.
Not my field, but consider law as a codification of custom. If a community practices "nonsensical disclaimers", adapts that practice to stakeholder concerns, establishes that practice as socially viable and worthwhile, and proliferates it as custom, then I suggest that yes, the law may well change.
Even in the short term, "nonsensical disclaimers" might impact 5-factor fair use decisions.
And consider the scientific community. Massive ignorance of, and disregard for, the letter of copyright law. There is instead a different social norm, built on acknowledgement. Are those "nonsensical disclaimers"?
Even when creation of law is corrupt, and especially when enforcement of law is corrupt, societal norms do matter.
Perhaps one might usefully examine the youtube copying and "nonsensical disclaimers" as a semi-aware form of civil disobedience?
You may be right here, going forwards I am going to provide more commentary on my posts.
But if you ignore the technical legal points, am I really harming anyone by posting 75% of Paul Graham's essay on medium. It's definitely providing value to all of the people on Medium who wouldn't come across it normally, and Paul Graham isn't losing any valuable traffic or sales from this.
So really what's the harm? Just because precedents have been set in cases involving much more monetary risk doesn't mean that what I'm doing is harming anyone. In my opinion, it's helping.
> if you ignore the technical legal points, am I really harming anyone
> In my opinion, it's helping.
Have you talked this over with Paul Graham (the copyright holder)? Because if you have, and he agreed that it was fine for you to post this to Medium then you are NOT violating copyright law. On the other hand, if you DIDN'T ask him, then YOU are assuming for yourself the right to decide whether this is or isn't "harming anyone" without asking Paul.
Perhaps he is in the middle of negotiations with an advertiser for his site who knows that it has valuable old essays that can't be found on places like Medium. Or perhaps Paul counts on old essays to help establish his reputation, even though he doesn't directly make money from them. These are unlikely, but my point is that YOU DON'T KNOW.
This isn't a case of "ignoring the technical legal points", it is a case of "directly violating the law"! And for good reason -- I may quibble with the length of copyright, but I strongly believe that the basic rights granted by copyright are mostly correct in this situation. I think it SHOULD be up to the author to decide where to publish it and where not to.
Good news though. Even if you DIDN'T get Paul's permission before publishing, copyright law is flexible enough that you may STILL be OK. Specifically, it is not a crime to violate copyright, so you can't be sent to jail over this and you can't be prosecuted by some overzealous District Attorney. Instead, Paul (the copyright holder) has the right to sue you. If he's feeling nice (which he probably is) then he won't.
But stop just copying people's stuff. It's not OK, both legally AND (in my opinion) morally.
The first comment in this thread, read like "I made a mistake, sorry." I took it at face value. This comment makes me think that might have been a mistake because it misses the point that copying articles from one source onto another source and then submitting to Hacker News, is not consistent with the community norms of Hacker News [1].
The earlier submission makes Hacker News worse because it is low quality. That is the relevant harm here. It is why the community flagged the earlier submission. If that isn't compelling, maybe the high number of the comments here that are unrelated to Graham's essay (like this one) might be.
[1]: It is also inconsistent with the guidelines which favor original sources.
To address your point ("So what's really the harm here"), there's a lot of reasons copyright law exists, including:
1. By using his work without permission, you risk misrepresenting his message. For example, you might accidentally remove a key passage or quote or citation. After all, you say "Below are (in our opinion) the essential excerpts" - I have a feeling he wouldn't agree.
2. He almost certainly prefers to have his work consolidated in a single place (he has a distinctive style), for any number of reasons (branding, analytics, ability to remove and/or edit, etc.)
3. At the end of the day, it's his property.
I think it's easy to think "these laws don't really make sense here, because of [foo] reason", but it's nonsensical to do so without asking for pg's permission. You risk looking like you knew that he wouldn't be ok with it. If you really intended to help him, just ask.
That's exactly the same BS argument as "just give me your product for free and you'll get tons of publicity". Only works if the person proposing it is actually world-famous. Otherwise, it's just scamming. (Not even addressing the copyright infringement issues here.)
You are freeloading on PG's insight and fame, trying to increase yours at his expense. Even if the expense is relatively trivial, it's no less true.
If it were actually OK, you would have already asked PG if it was ok for you to hack up his articles and re-publish them under your name.
Come to think of it, why don't you ask him directly, and see if he thinks it's ok, or what conditions he'd put on it?
It's not about your opinion. Of course you think what you're doing is ok, everyone does. Fortunately we have a general consensus (and laws) that say what you did was wrong. Own it.
What the fuck are you doing? You cannot possibly not know that what you're doing is theft, and feigning ignorance makes what you're doing even more insidious.
The internet is choke-full of content that was "recycled" and stripped of attribution. I wouldn't call it the cancer of the web, but perhaps algae overgrowth would be a fitting metaphor.
You would need to add something original and of value to have it accepted here.
Also, your apology is very tone-deaf. I imagine it pisses people off way more than the copyright issue.
People have come along and contributed occasionally, but for the most part, I’m doing everything: writing the compiler, standard library, documentation, editor integration, blog posts, evangelism of the programming paradigm, and so on. Despite the fact that I don’t scale, I’ll happily sit down with someone who’s trying out the language, help them get up to speed, and fix all the bugs and usability issues they report. It’s that kind of connection to people that not only drives interest in the project, but drives me to stay motivated.
I can’t say I fully understand my own success…or even whether it’s success. I’m not selling anything, just making the language I want to use. Maybe a few hundred lines of code have been written in the language by someone other than me. I’ve accumulated >450 stars on GitHub for a product that doesn’t even do anything yet. It’s certainly surreal, but it’s been pleasant. :)