------------ The FreeLore Bulletin No. 1 18 December 1992 Thank you for your interest in the FreeLore Project. At the moment, the project consists of persons who have contacted me and expressed interest, including yourself. As of this writing (D-Day + 1) I have received approximately twenty responses, and more are coming in. If you did not requested the FreeLore Tracts, I will send them to you on Monday, 21st December, perhaps with the next bulletin. This issue of the bulletin contains: **1 Initial Focus of the FreeLore Project **2 Parallel Projects: I know very little, but if you write me the next edition will be quite informative! **3 FreeLore Project Glossary and proto-FAQ ============== **1 Initial Focus of the FreeLore Project: What Would You Like? The invitation you received contained a long list of activities we might engage in or promote. Here is a shorter list that describes what I consider the focus of the FreeLore Project. This list is up for discussion. I will try to provide a digest of comments I receive in the next bulletin. FreeLore Project promotes: --the production of free educational and other useful materials (``FreeLore'') in the electronic and electronically-derived print media; --capture of public domain data in a useful electronic form; --production of freely distributed software to view and use FreeLore; --free access to information generally. Specifics: There are basically two sorts of persons interested in helping the project: --persons who would like to help with software --persons who want to write or capture data My own sense of what we should do is get together a kit to help anyone interested in creating public-domain or copyrighted but freely- distributable materials. The kit would include instructions on preparing the materials and software to aid in preparation or viewing. The idea behind the kit is to make it very easy to join the project as a writer. The main purpose of the project is to aid these people, who comprise our ``clients''. We will not have much control over the sorts of material people like to contribute, beyond identifying needs and publishing a list of completed projects, if they tell us. The kit gives a focus to the software effort: what should we ask the writers/capturers to do? What software will they need? This gets into issues of what hardware and software requirements, the present state of freely distributed software, and the target format. I have in mind a volunteer who wants to write a textbook or is willing to type in or scan public-domain materials, but doesn't know how to make the resulting text useful in a computer environment. My own sense of what is useful to provide such a person is biased towards some sort of marked-up text that can either be printed out or viewed as ``hypertext''. Hypertext lets you skip around in the text following cross-references, rather like flipping pages in a book. It is becoming a fairly common feature in commercial word-processing systems. If you are interested in the software side, you will realize that there are very few public domain tools for markup and for viewing hypertext. The most mature and widely usable ones I know are TeX, a markup language for typesetting, and a program called Texinfo by the GNU project. If you know of others, tell me. One of our tasks will be to survey this field; decide if we can use existing software; and chart out what needs to be done in the public or copylefted domain. My ideas are just my present bias; I can be convinced otherwise if we want to do something else. ======== Request for Comment: Here are questions I think we need to thrash out. Mail me your reactions and I will try to present a digest of responses. (software) o Should we concentrate on old, but widespread technology (text terminals) or should we go for hot new stuff like X windows and multimedia? [my bias: we need a core of useful stuff that can be read on any text terminal, with an eye to compatibility with proprietary readers and X windows; our goal should be to make the systems all work off the same textual ``source code''.] o Should we adopt a single markup language (or a small number of them) as standard? [my bias: we should choose TeX as a provisional markup language and make sure we stay on the SGML path. A lot has been written in TeX, and if we advertise we may even get submissions. We should consider supporting other markup languages on request. We should encourage the Texinfo macro package for TeX because it has a hypertext viewer. We should get involved in the next generation of Texinfo and try to get it to converge with the World Wide Web project and SGML conversion]. (materials) o Should the writing side focus on data capture, or writing new materials or some mixture? [my bias: we should focus on writing new materials. Data capture would be easier for a more centralized project. If data capture were the only problem, it would have been solved long ago. The real problem is making our stuff useful and free. That probably means we have to write it or type it in ourselves.] o Should the materials have some sort of copyright? [my bias: we should copyleft our stuff so we retain some control over versions and integrity. The public domain reminds me of a vacant lot. It's hard to do anything with it because everyone owns it.] o What sorts of materials are most needed? [my bias: educational materials at the high school and introductory college levels. Everyone talks about the promise of computers for education, but I haven't seen it. Expensive proprietary information on CD-ROM and a commercial hypertext viewer (or worse, ``educational software'') are not enough. We need a large body of educational material for students to explore and learn from, free of cost. Other stuff is important, too, but if we give people free access to textbooks, there will be more literate people to use our other stuff, and more computers to use it on.] ====================== **2 Parallel Projects Here is absolutely all I know about parallel projects. Please tell me if you know more! A. Freely-distributable Curricula o Usenet University (alt.uu.future) is trying to put materials together; the effort is very decentralized. o the FreeLore Project might do this. B. Public Domain Data Capture Projects o Project Gutenburg -- someone mentioned it (public domain?) o OBI project -- someone mentioned it (public domain?) C. Free Software o GNU Project -- a large line of ``copylefted'' software; you probably know all about this. (Contact Free Software Foundation). o TeX -- a typesetting program especially designed for text with equations; you know this too. (Contact TeX Users Group) o TeX to SGML converter -- one exists in public domain somewhere (?) o public domain SGML readers? I keep looking for a FAQ in comp.text.sgml, but haven't seen one. o the World Wide Web is a project at CERN (High Energy Physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland). D. Proprietary o SGML markup of English Literature -- Designed as a research tool for English Profs.; I read an advertisement for the CD rom; very expensive. o existing CD-ROMs commercially available with public domain stuff like the King James Bible, Aristotle in (old) translations, English authors with expired copyrights, etc., together with newer stuff like dictionaries that is almost always more expensive than the book (special systems needed to read? We need a survey of these) == FreeLore Project Glossary Here is how I use terms. If you have new entries or corrections, send them to me. One day this will be part of a FAQ. Anonymous FTP == obtaining documents over the internet via the File Transfer Protocol. Copylefting == a GNU Project-type software licence or copyright, in which copyright is retained but non-commercial distribution is allowed subject to some restrictions. The restrictions are usually designed to prevent commercial use (or acquisition of a copyright by virtue of subsequent work), or to allow version control and protection of artistic integrity. Freely distributed == public domain or else copylefted; not proprietary. FreeLore == useful information that has been copylefted; loosely any freely distributable, useful information. FreeLore Project == a project that promotes --the production of free educational and other useful materials (``FreeLore'') in the electronic and electronically-derived print media; --capture of public domain data in a useful electronic form; --production of freely distributed software to view and use FreeLore; --free access to information generally. Free Software Foundation == an organization that promotes sharing of software by sponsoring the GNU Project and other activities. GNU Project == GNU's not Unix. A project by the Free Software Foundation to provide a complete copylefted Unix-like operating system. The GNU project is the source of the term Copylefted. GOPHER == An information service (free?) on the Internet (tell me more) HTML == HyperText Markup Language. A form of SGML without some header and trailer tags that is used by the World Wide Web. A Texinfo to HTML converter exists, although I haven't tried it. Hypertext == Plain text (ASCII) with special markup that allows one to jump around from point to point in the document, say, to follow a cross-reference, look at a figure, or read an index entry. Hypertext is becoming more common in commercial word processing systems. (see the World Wide Web for more details and an internet wide implementation.) Markup == putting extra symbols in an ASCII text to show formatting, document structure, embedded data, or to allow hypertext capabilities. Quasi-public domain == copylefted; having a GNU-like copyright. SGML == Standard Generalize Markup Language. This is an ISO standard for document interchange. It is not a format, a specific markup language, or a proprietary program. Based on GML, an old IBM standard. It uses a Document Type Description (DTD) to specify the meaning of special markers called tags. The markers look like HERE IS YOUR TEXT . Because the syntax is hard to type, it is often generated by a program or translated from another markup language (say TeX). Commercial systems will probably (?) adopt it. Many existing markup languages have or will have translators to it. TeX == a typesetting program especially designed for text with equations; you know this too. (Contact TeX Users Group: address add here) Texinfo == a program used by the GNU project for most of its documentation. It processes a special TeX file and allows either viewing it as hypertext or creating a TeX output file for printing. Usenet University == an attempt to use the Usenet newsgroups for educational purposes; does not grant degrees or have a set curriculum. see their FAQ in the alt.uu hierarchy (or FTP ???) WAIS = Wide Area Information Service (tell me more). World Wide Web == an SGML-based hypertext project of CERN, a High Energy Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. They have a public domain program that lets you treat the whole of internet as a single hypertext document. You jump from node to node and view publically available information through WWW servers. Access to GOPHER and WAIS (wide area information service). Still a bit primitive, but you can try it if you telnet info.cern.ch and login as WWW [no password]. ========== For further information contact: John E. Goodwin jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov =========== Copyright (c) 1992 John E. Goodwin Permission is hereby granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the FreeLore Tracts provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.