Well, jgrahamc did post a link (http://blog.jgc.org/2013/02/updated-list-of-my-gnu-make-arti...) to 38 articles that provide free information on GNU Make usage. Reading his post suggests that the new book is a properly edited and formatted edition of the older book with the same content updated to Make 4.0.
Copyright law is pretty crappy on the whole, but jgrahamc did write the articles and has been giving them away for free. Why is it unreasonable for him to package, edit, update, and release them years after they were written, with the originals still available for free?
I do not get the impression that the “The GNU Make Book” has any substantial similarity with the freely available “Ask Mr. Make” articles – I get the impression that the book is a wholly new work, aimed at being a general manual for GNU Make. The title is especially clear in giving me this impression, but also the text describing the book on its home page gives me no reason to doubt my conclusion.
Anyway, whatever other good things jgrahamc may have done is immaterial, since I was not only speaking about him, but also about the general case and its consequences. Also, I did not say it was “unreasonable” of anyone to do this. I said that when anyone does something like what jgrahamc did, they take away some unknown amount of human and monetary resources from the authors of the actual software and the official manual, and I don’t think that this drawback is worth it to have a new & improved, but non-freely licenced, manual.
Copyright law is pretty crappy on the whole, but jgrahamc did write the articles and has been giving them away for free. Why is it unreasonable for him to package, edit, update, and release them years after they were written, with the originals still available for free?