More on manuals plus rescue

[Tothwolf]

On Wed, 19 Aug 2015, Sean Caron wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 7:50 PM, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 19 Aug 2015, Tothwolf wrote:
>>
>>> I have to disagree strongly with Will on this. There are quite a few 
>>> "PDF manual dealers" who honestly deserve to go out of business. Those 
>>> "dealers" tend to fall into two categories:
>>
>> It does not matter. You can not scan ashes.
>
> I guess if philistines want to pillage themselves, that is their sad 
> perogative ... but if releasing the entirety of Manuals Plus to the 
> public domain will break them, maybe they don't really have anything all 
> that unique after all?

According to Becky at Manuals Plus, these companies that have taken to 
selling people scans of manuals, combined with all the other freely 
available online manuals played a large part in them shutting down.

Tektronix also issued a public statement giving permission for people to 
freely duplicate and distribute their older test equipment manuals not all 
that long ago, and that can't have helped either.

The way I look at it, the companies that took to selling people PDF copies 
of manuals they've collected and then tried to lock up have had it coming, 
and some of them have been due such a blow for a long time now.

I'm starting to look at this much like what happened with Netscape vs 
Microsoft Internet Explorer. Microsoft might have more or less killed off 
Netscape, but in releasing the source code which became Mozilla Firefox, 
they seriously damaged Microsoft's market share later.