I continue to run across subtle and blatant plagiarism in other sites, videos, and streamers. This has been a problem my whole fucking life. The most egregious was when an asshole at Nike took my proposal sent to a few key people (including my manager in private) and having my manager call me in and later show me my exact email with names changed coming from one of the persons on the list as their own “initiative” to which my manager and I simply chuckled and called him out on it.
Another time my entire training material about CGI scripting (back in the 90s) appeared on another ISP’s site, again, my manager (Lynne) found that one. We sent them a cease and desist.
This is what being an autodidact means. You are constantly learning things before everyone else and when you publish that knowledge it becomes valuable. The Innovators book is full of these stories. Some are downright depressing. There are the Woz’s of the world, and the Jobs’. The world needs both, but my God I wish the Woz’s got more credit and resources than they ever do. Mauchley as a much earlier version of Jobs. And Ada Lovelace was a fucking bitch to Babbage claiming he would be nothing without her. (I shit you not. You seriously have to read how this well-portrayed, artfully painted woman ripped Babbage a new asshole in order to get credit for her contributions.)
These days the plagiarism is more subtle and harder to distinguish from “influence” because people are changing their positions and writing about them. Or they digest your writing and come up with their own angle. That’s fine. Most do not bother to make any attribution, a rare few do, and some downright lavish me in unearned, hyperbolic praise. It goes with the territory I suppose.
But you have to love it when the shills pushing for this and that extremely expensive bootcamp or certificate program or technical education curriculum follow you for all your free knowledge and skills education and then turn around and make money off of it without any attribution at all.
I’ve learned that people will steal if they want to steal and unless you are a litigious asshole chasing them all around all you can do is be happy and move on and consider it a compliment.
Besides, knowledge is to be shared. I truly believe that. As long as the good stuff it getting out there and people are being influenced to use and learn it then I’m good. It just makes it hard because I have to have a full-time job in addition to all this because I refuse to stuff all this in one of several O’Reilly or Addison and Wesley books like so many others do. I just can’t. I’ve been approached by multi-national educational and training companies to create all their material. One in particular I actually asked point blank, “Can I keep this and release it as open content as well?” And the very polite person vetting me said, “Oh no, this would be for our organization.” I don’t have to tell you how I responded.