Okay, Mr. Anonymous Monk, you're starting to piss me off. All you are doing is justifying your actions to yourself after the fact. The knowledge contained in the book is what you wished to gain and rather than pay for it or get a job and earn the money to buy it, you took the easy route and copied it. Now that you've been called on it you get defensive.
The point here is that merlyn and others have worked to produce this literature and they have decided to sell it on the grounds that they, like you, need to live. Most of the information presented in any of these books is available elsewhere completely free: If you have perl installed then you've got the manpages, then you've got most of the info already, the BIG difference lies in the way that it is presented: merlyn and others have worked to present the information in such a way that it is more easily understandable and also in such a way that enables the reader to see the possibilities inherent in regexps, for example, rather than a dry listing of the modifiers and metacharacters. This is what you are paying for, not the information, so please, feel free to copy what the hell you like software, books anything but don't ever try and justify yourself in such a puerile and asinine way.
Okay, so you may say that a piece of software is also thus: Ordered, horizontal arrangements of sixty two alphanumerics and about twenty other assorted characters structured so as to produce pretty pictures, or connect to another computer and download data. Indeed so, however in this case the author has the FREEDOM to decide whether he wants to release it under the GPL or to make it proprietary and, indeed this is his right and exactly how it should be just in the way that, should merlyn so choose, all of his perl books could be .pdf'd and freely available at the Stonehenge site.
Basically what I'm saying is this: Grow up. People have to live and eat and pay their phone, electricity and legal bills. merlyn chooses to do this by writing books and lecturing on perl (among other things) because he isn't bad at it. Don't deny other people the freedom to make their livings or one day, some snot-nosed little student may start to infringe on yours by reproducing your work and giving it away to all and sundry for free.
"Violence is the first resort of those faced with yet another BSOD."
--/me
ADDENDUM: Personally I think Richard Stallman's ideas are extreme to the point of pointlessness (This doesn't stop me from using emacs ;-) and actually counter to what he wishes to produce. I support Open Source on pragmatic grounds rather than some high-minded ideal.
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