Today I found out that one of the articles I had written for PHPWomen had been plagiarised, by someone running a development company. I was more disappointed than angry because;

• PHP is a development community - we are supposed to have respect for one another as developers
• I wouldn’t have minded if the article had been referenced and commented on
• The person who committed the plagiarism, although young, appears to be quite switched on

The correspondence between Tim and myself follows;

Hi Tim,

I was just wondering why you plagiarised my article from PHPWomen and passed it off as your own?

http://www.phpwomen.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=225&start=0&S=dc5fb133c9c86f9fb3deb2aed6242e60

http://debuggable.com/posts/comparison-operators-when-equals-does-equal-equals:480f4dfd-e744-445d-8717-45b3cbdd56cb

Regards,
Kathy

Tim’s reply;

Okay I can’t seem to fix it for now.

I will delete the post now. I obviously should have linked back to you explaining your article instead of reflecting it and adding my two cents here and there.

I hope you are fine with the deletion. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Best,
Tim

Well, at least he’s done the right thing by deleting it – but he never should have copied it in the first place!

Is the deletion enough, or should he publish a public apology?