thoughts from the test eye

There are lots of people that share material they have created, and make them publically available for anyone.

There are lots of people that share material they have created, and make them publically available for anyone.
Everything is of course not good, but a lot is, and this helps our community to grow, people can build upon each others work, and our combined knowledge increases.
I think most testers do this because they have something to tell, and they want to contribute, but there are also factors like ego and brand-building involved.

But there are rules for how to use other’s materials, especially regarding how to re-use other peoples material.
Besides general copyright rules and common sense, a lot of sites have specific licenses you need to adhere to.
At thetesteye.com, all our publications are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
This means that you can re-use our material if you give attribution, and if you don’t modify the content (this is to make sure the ideas aren’t misrepresented).

I have experienced several good examples of this, for instance persons asking if they are allowed to translate material (a derivation that needs approval), and when they are done they send a link to the material.

But here are violations I have seen recently of my material:

• no attribution
• attribution in form of “inspired by”, but large chunks of material is copy/paste
• copy/paste of only some parts, taking away the real essence
• copy/paste of material that itself had references, but those references have been removed
• word-by-word translations of large chunks of material
• translations of large chunks of material but with re-phrasing in marketing-style, so it doesn’t really make sense
• re-use of non-public material

There is no point in just re-distributing material (a link is better in that case), so make sure you add something yourself; challenging an idea, developing it further etc.
If you are unsure what is OK or not, I recommend asking a friend and then contacting the author.
If you see something that is re-used incorrectly, I recommend informing the thief about this.

We need to respect the work of others, otherwise people might stop sharing, and the community is at loss.