WTF did happen with struct constructor and ref in 2.061 ?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 23:32:45 -0500
Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> On 1/3/13 11:26 PM, Rob T wrote:
> 
> > I like the idea of the e-book but we need an up-to-date copy and it
> > should be available free of charge. If the D community needs
> > funding, a method of making donations is a much better and more
> > acceptable route to take.
> 
> This is a misunderstanding and I confess I'm mildly miffed by it. The 
> e-book is generated from the online documentation. $0.99 is the
> smallest price Amazon would allow any self-publication to be on their
> site.

It's an ebook version of the content on dlang.org, right? That should
be free. If Amazon won't allow it to be free then it shouldn't be on
Amazon. End of story.

If you want people to be able to read it on a Kindle, then use
something that doesn't require going through Amazon. If it's not
possible to provide a document that's free to view on Kindle (I don't
know whether that's the case), then it's the users own damn problem
for buying a device that won't allow them to view free/freely-available
content. But the bottom line is, we should not, and should never have
released an electronic copy of the website content in a for-cost form.
I was opposed to to it from the beginning.

> Some people (negligible as a source of income, but not few; the
> book makes it at times on top 100 bestseller list in its category) do
> find value in having the content on their Kindle, and are willing to
> pay one dollar for it, so there is value in having it there. To
> construe that as an awkward attempt to make money is quite a bit of a
> stretch.
> 

It's not about whether anyone's trying to make money. It's about the
ethics *AND THE PUBLIC IMAGE* of selling copies of our own
free-on-the-web documentation. One dollar, one cent, half a cent, it's
irrelevent.

If a platform or website won't allow free content to be free, then said
content doesn't belong on that platform/website, period. That's all
there is to it.