OK, so you are very new to blogging. But even you realize that cutting & pasting other peoples stuff from their blogs to your own – if not illegal – is very morally, ethically and professionally suspect. Especially, if you company retails services from the same web-page. I mean, no-one would be so stupid/fool-hardy/bereft of business ethics to do such a thing. OR would they?

Unfortunately, a company called Nexus Technologies in Ireland doesn’t seem to understand the basic principles of author citation. They have whole sale copied my friend Gabrie’s blog posts on ESXi (and other peoples work). In case you don’t Nexus Technologies this is what they say about themselves:

“Nexus Technologies has the experience of over 10 years in the IT industry.  From working on large scale projects in Dell Computers, Microsoft, University College Cork, Data Centres and 5 years on numerous large scale IT projects within the Fleming Group  Avast level of experience has been gained and numerous contacts have been created. Some of these projects include Fota Island Resort, Cork, Rockbrook, Sandyford, Dublin.  We have also been involved in the planning of a 50,000 sq. Ft. Data Center in the West Cork Technology Park, Clonakilty Co. Cork, and investigating the greener element of computing and energy conservation.”

You would think a company with such eminent experience and credentials would know better. However, when Gabrie took this up with Damien Sherdian at Nexus Technologies he was met with with the following excuse:

“Gabrie,

I did not accept or dent any disclaimer with the below information on it. Therefore any reference to the information is public access and can be used accordingly.

Any further issues feel free to contact me directly.

Nexus Technologies.”

The offending blog post (amongst many others is here)

http://www.nexustechnologies.tv/?p=1064

and Gabrie’s original is here:

http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=829

EVENING UPDATE:
It looks like Gabrie’s post has been deleted. But Nexus still have a Tech Republic post originally written by Scott Lowe which is straight copy & paste:

http://www.nexustechnologies.tv/?p=1078

Here’s the original that they just cut & pasted…

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=660

It seems to be that Damien is using legal technicality – to essentially gloss over the whole sale theft of someone elses intellectual property. Even if Damien is legally right, I don’t think his position is morally or ethically correct. I wonder what Nexus Technologies customers think of this kind of behaviour?

I dunno maybe I am wrong. What do you (30K readers a week) think? Damian does invite people to comment – his email address is damiens@nexustechnologies.tv perhaps you would like to drop him an email explaining what you think. Is he right or wrong?

Anyway. I thought it would be nice to explain to Damien and others by simple lesson how you cite other peoples work. Here it goes:

Hey, there – blog readers. To do it came to my attention a really good script. This script can be run remotely against your ESX hosts to find if your VMs support the right disk format for VMware FT. It was written by William Lam. If you don’t know William he’s very active in the VMware Community and contributes many scripts to help administrators. You can find William’s FT Disk script here:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11554

You can become one of Williams followers on twitter here: http://twitter.com/lamw

His other scripts are available from his website here: http://www.engr.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/

[Was that so hard?]

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.