alt Hacker NewsIt appears the author is leveraging Fabien's branding by copying not only the style of post but more importantly the formatting and style of Fabien's books. Even structurally the book appears quite similar.
If you didn't double check the author while skimming this Keen book, you may well be mistaken that it was written by Fabien.
I took a quick skim of the content, it looks great - tempted to purchase a copy to support the author for their efforts (and have it sit on the bookshelf next to two other very similar looking books...) but need to sit on this for a while.
Maybe I'm overthinking this. Would like to hear Fabien's take on the situation.
[EDIT] It looks that the Keen book author copied and pasted direct sections[1] out of Fabien's book's TeX[2].
[EDIT] The git commit history has comments that indicate that Fabien reviewed the book, e.g. "updated all chapters after feedback Fabien" and "Proofread Fabien Sanglard en hardcopy review", so perhaps this is all sanctioned.
[1] https://github.com/bsmits74/Keen_White_Papers/blob/master/sr...
[2] https://github.com/fabiensanglard/gebbdoom/blob/master/src/b...
Replies
He responds to this thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546779
> perhaps this is all sanctioned
In short, it is not.
I received early draft from bas. While I encouraged him to finish his book, I also told him, in no uncertain terms, that I had released the source code to inspire people and give them a kickstart, but not for them to copy the content.
As months passed, I asked repeatedly to remove whole paragraphs he had copy/pasted as is, and drawings he had also copy/pasted. Later, as A.I became more powerful, I used it to compare Wolfenstein 3D and Keen book and noticed a lot more that was verbatim. At which point I told him I no longer wanted to help him in his project.
It is cool that someone documented Keen thanks to my framework. But I have only myself to blame for opensourcing the code of my books/website and thinking people would use it as intended.
PS: I commented it was a "good idea" to change the cover because originally this was going to be the "Game Engine Black Book: Commander Keen". I did not like that his work could have been mistaken for mine (he also elected to use the same style as my website for his website which only adds to the confusion).