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Professor Creates His Own Cisco Manual
yootje writes "ZDnet is running a story about a professor who made his own Cisco networking textbook, with 800 pages: "Computing instructor Matt Basham's suggestions for improving Cisco Systems' official training manuals fell on deaf ears for years. But he appears to have the networking giant's attention now." The professor made his book available for free on his website."
I'm still wondering why the governments don't require free and "open source" text for public schools. In college, the professors used to change the text every semester so that the students couldn't sell the books back at the end of the semester (likely getting kick-backs from the text manufacturers, no doubt).
If just one state would sit down and even purchase some good works and make them freely available for modification and distribution, then the cost of education would be greatly reduced. Profs would be free to make changes at it fits their style so long as those changes are re-posted to the public. Students could read the texts online and/or print them.
What am I not seeing here?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Sue him for what exactly? He wrote the book and unless he's plagiarised some of its content, then they wouldn't have much of a case. Given his profession, I'm sure he's more than capable of writing this book on his own.
He's the owner of the material, and I seriously doubt that he can be sued for anything at all.
It's quite strange that it is not a PDF file.
but is anyone wants the 5 meg html version it here
If you register at Lulu, the free download is a PDF.
I don't know where you got your info from but Java is NOT ECMA standardized and as for .net, only the CLR and C# langauge are ECMA standardized.
So it's only three pages long? Somehow I expected more.
RTFA:
<quote>Before publishing the book on his own, Basham said he had contacted Cisco Press about publishing it, but it wasn't interested. After his free book appeared online last week, however, the company contacted him via e-mail requesting a meeting to discuss the program at St. Petersburg College.
Company spokeswoman Goodwin said that Cisco is always looking for ways to improve the program.
She said that although instructors are required to teach the Cisco Academy curriculum, they are welcome to supplement it as necessary. She also emphasized that none of the Cisco Academy students are required to buy any of the textbooks from Cisco.
"Cisco has a long-standing relationship with St. Petersburg College," she said. "And we have a process-oriented quality assurance program with the (Cisco) Academy where we work collaboratively with institutions to solicit feedback. We are continually making improvements based on customer needs."</quote>
Cisco obviously thinks this is as cool as most of us think it is.
Thanks guys...I am not a lawyer but have spent several years studying copyright and internet law...I even got the opportunity to lead a session at Harvard Law School one summer. Heck, one of the professors there, Johnathon Zittrain, even downloaded the book...he's an old-school chat room moderator turned internet lawyer...he and his colleagues have even taking pro-bono work to fight for open source rights. I think I have sufficiently covered my assets with respect to the book...it has actually been out for three years and I haven't heard anything so far. Besides I put some really specific phrases in there that help cast aside their chances. Thanks again. I will go out and read all the posts too. You should see the one on www.macpro.se that appeared in swedish! Gratis lärobok för Ciscos kurser Thanks again Matt PS if you download the book shoot me an email and let me know where you are located...I am keeping track on a map. Bashamm@spcollege.edu
I converted the MS Word to a PDF and it is available on my school's server. They are going to hate me:
http://www.lehigh.edu/~mlt3/textbook.pdf
How did this seriously strange view of IP law get modded up?
You don't need permission from anybody to publish an API. There is no special copyright law covering API specifications.
Perhaps you are thinking of trade-secret status?
Well, if something has been publicly published, it doesn't doesn't get trade-secret status. And that goes even if they put some silly 'license' on their documentation.
(See for instance the BSDi case, where the Unix sources were found not to have trade-secret status without even being public, but simply because they had been seen by so many people. And that is despite the fact that they even had written agreements with all of them.)
You don't have to get a license to publish an original book on anything, ever.
Do you know what a license is? A license is permission from a rights-holder to exercise an otherwise exclusive right.
For copyright, that means performing, reproducing and creating derivatives of copyrighted material.
For patents, that means the right to manufacture and use the invention.
For trade-secrets, that means the right to divulge and use commercially the trade secret.
Now, if I chose not to publish my API secret, then it may be a trade-secret, in which case you may not have the right to publish it if you happen to be 'in' on it. APIs can however be reverse-engineered. You can reverse-engineer an API without any trade-secret knowledge (i.e. 'clean-room') and publish that, that is perfectly legal.
Perhaps you think that the API itself can be copyrighted, and that a description of the API is a derivative work? Well, that's a theory, but very dubious legally.
Under copyright law, code is separated into the "expressional" and "functional" parts, and APIs reasonably always fall into the latter part, and are therefore not copyrightable. In case law, good room is generally given for compatibility code, being functional. (Again, you can see the BSDi case, where it was found that header files describing the same Unix API were not infringing)
If the API itself is not copyrighted, something which has yet to be seen, the description of the API cannot be a derivative work.
Naturally, the description itself can be copyrighted, including the official description, (e.g. the API specification) but anyone can write their own description.