NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/hypertex/1053

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-25 | 23.8 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!uwm.edu!lll-winken!fnnews.fnal.gov!cns35.fnal.gov!jgoodwin
From: [e-mail] (John Goodwin)
Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
Subject: FreeLore Bulletin
Keywords: freelore, FreeLore Project, FreeLore Whitepaper
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 25 Jan 93 16:04:00 GMT
Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, AD/Controls
Lines: 776
NNTP-Posting-Host: cns35.fnal.gov
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

===========================
FreeLore Bulletin No. 3    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
19 January 1993

CONTACT:  John Goodwin, Moderator
          Fermilab
          [e-mail]

          [phone] (voice)

---------------------------

Copyright (c) 1993 by The FreeLore Project.  You
may make verbatim copies of this bulletin for
non-commercial purposes by any means, provided
this copyright notice appears on all such copies.

---------------------------
Articles

**1.  FreeLore Project Steering Committee Formed
**2.  How to become a Member of the FreeLore
Project
**3.  Join a (Virtual) Mailing List
**4.  The FreeLore Whitepaper is Out
**5.  Request for BBS and E-journal Posting
**6.  Getting Documents and Information

---------------------------
**1.  FREELORE PROJECT STEERING COMMITTEE FORMED

The FreeLore Project has around 30 members with
many different interests, all focused on our basic
goal of producing freely redistributable (FR)
educational materials and the software to use
them.

The following persons have agreed to be on the
FreeLore Project steering committee:

 John Goodwin, Moderator [e-mail]
 Gary Benson            [e-mail]
 Richard Kim            [e-mail]
 Gavin Nicole           [e-mail]

Each mailing list comprises a working group or
committee on its topic.

Please consider volunteering for the project by
joining a mailing list (see article #3 and the
FreeLore Whitepaper for details).

  >>THE FREELORE PROJECT IS IN DESPARATE NEED OF
  A MAIL SERVER.  IF YOU CAN DONATE A SERVER AND
  SOME DISK SPACE, EITHER TO DISTRIBUTE OUR
  DOCUMENTS AND SOURCE CODE OR TO STORE CONTRIBUTED
  FREELORE, CONTACT US.

We have a small amount of space (<1 MB) offered on
an interim basis by:

   [e-mail],

but need a donor for a mail server in the longer term.

---------------------------
**2.  HOW TO BECOME A MEMBER OF THE FREELORE
PROJECT

Anyone can write freelore.  Write something
useful, and "copyleft" it by placing a notice like
the one above on your work.  The copyleft notice
makes your work freely redistributable (FR).
Anyone can make fair use of it and copy it, but it
is not in the Public Domain.  For more details on
copylefting, see the FreeLore Whitepaper.

Next, tell us what your document is about, how to
get it, and what format it is in.  We will try to
track FR documents in a useful way.  More than
anything else, the project needs volunteers who
write FreeLore.

The FreeLore Project exists to promote the writing
of FreeLore by:

  o Commissioning and tracking FreeLore;

  o Providing software to make writing FreeLore
easy; and

  o Promoting the distribution of FreeLore.

To be really useful, the document should be coded
in a commonly accepted character set like U.S.
ASCII, ISO 646, or Latin-1.  It also needs to be
marked up with a formatting language like nroff or
TeX; or better, with a generalized markup language
like SGML.  Learn about SGML and get a Document
Type Definition suitable for what you are writing.
Joining the FreeLore Project is a good way to keep
in touch with new developments in SGML and find
out about information sources.

To join the FreeLore Project, join a mailing list
and actively participate.  Contact the moderator
of the mailing list or one of the members of the
steering committee to get on a list.

Finally, send a few lines (15 lines max.) of 50
column text for inclusion in the FreeLore Project
Directory.  Include your contact information,
background, and what you would like to do.  Logos,
pictures, and quotations will be stripped before
inclusion.  Please use only E-mail safe characters
(no tabs).  Your email sig will not be used for
this information.  You must write it up specially
and tell us that it is for inclusion in the
directory.  If you want us to know about you but
don't want to be listed in the public version, put
"do not list" on the line before your entry.

---------------------------
**3.  JOIN A MAILING LIST

Because the  FreeLore Project does not yet have a
listserver, mailing lists, are being handled by
hand.  Send e-mail to [e-mail]
to join a mailing-list.

Valid commands:

   SUBSCRIBE FL-XWINDOWS
   UNSUBSCRIBE FL-BULLETIN
   GET FL-BULL-1
   GET INDEX, etc.

The human parser is very versitile and also
understands plain English and a few other
languages.  See article #6 for a list of documents
available.

Members are automatically added to FL-ANNOUNCE,
FL-BULLETIN, and FL-INFO.  In addition, if you
mentioned an interest in software, you have been
added to the FL-SOFTWARE list.  You should still
join a sublist.

One member from each list should consider
volunteering to handle the list's traffic for that
group. Initially the Project Moderator will act as
moderator for all lists.  You must subscribe to
the list in order to post to it.  Your initial
post should be a letter of introduction to the
group.  You will then get a list of subscribers,
i.e. the moderator will not act as an email
repeater, although he should receive a copy of all
letters.  Correspondence will not be archived.

WE WILL HAVE A MAIL SERVER AS SOON AS SOMEONE
DONATES ONE.

   FL-ANNOUNCE

      The FL-ANNOUNCE list will be for press releases
and product announcements.

   FL-BULLETIN

      This list is for members and other
interested persons who want to keep up with the
status of the FreeLore Project.

   FL-INFO

      General information on FreeLore Project
goals and resources; what is FreeLore; finding and
ordering FreeLore; Information on related
projects; what the FreeLore Project is about; how
can I find FreeLore on the Internet; what's out
there.

   FL-COPYRIGHT

      Discussion of copyright issues; moral and
political issues raised by the project; copyright
law, software patents; actions of groups like the
League for Programming Freedom.

   FL-AUTHORS

      This group is for authors writing FreeLore.
It will provide guidelines for markup and help
with our and other's SGML products.

   FL-CONNECTIVITY

      This is the group that will coordinate the
distribution of project materials to BBS and
E-journals.  We need contacts for this list to
"get the word out" about FreeLore.

   FL-TEXINFO

      Since we cannot wait for the SGML DTDs to be
fully defined to start creating FreeLore, we are
using TeX as the interim markup standard with
Texinfo encouraged for internal project documents
(same as the GNU project).  This group is for
writers of general interest material--Internet
FAQs, RFCs, Software Documentation, etc., who need
information about our use of Texinfo and
eventually conversion tools to SGML.

   FL-SOFTWARE

      If you said you wanted to write software, you are
on this list and one or more of the following
sublists:

   o FL-BROWSER sublist

      Join this list to help write the hypertext
Browser.  GNU Info is our interim browser.  If you
want to write the X windows version join
FL-XWINDOWS as well.

   o FL-DTD sublist

      These people will write the Texinfo Document
Type Definition (DTD) and other DTDs as needed.

   o FL-EDITOR sublist

      This group will write a WYSIWYG editor for
adding SGML markup to documents.

   FL-INFORMAION-RETRIEVAL sublist

      Cataloguing all the useful FR information in
the world is a hopeless task.  Eventually we will
need to provide a software system to decentralize
this task, so that anyone can maintain and provide
catalogues of their FR holdings.  We'll be lucky
if we can maintain a list of the libraries.

      We need library scientists! This list will
discuss how to locate and catalogue FreeLore
material; how to make documents self-cataloguing;
and how to use FreeLore with WAIS or the World
Wide Web.

   o FL-MULTIMEDIA sublist

      The multimedia group will work on
implementing the Hytime standard in FR software
and on integrating multimedia and hypertext
capabilities into the FreeLore Project.

   o FL-SMALL-SYSTEMS sublist

      This group is for persons concerned with
porting the project software to small systems, and
representing the concerns of small system users to
the FreeLore Project.  Can our software be ported
to MS-DOS PCs, Amigas, or Linux?

   o FL-XWINDOWS sublist

      This group will discuss X Windows issues.
If you said you knew X in your request for
information, you are on this list.

----------------------------
**4.  THE FREELORE WHITEPAPER IS OUT

The FreeLore Whitepaper describes what freelore
is, how to make it, and how to join The FreeLore
Project.  This is our manifesto.  Version 1.0 is
appended to this bulletin after article #6.

---------------------------
**5.  REQUEST FOR BBS AND E-JOURNAL POSTING

If you have access to a bulletin board, please
post our materials.  E-Journals: please tell your
readers about FreeLore.  Join the FL-CONNECTIVITY
list so that we can keep track of BBS and
E-Journals interested in the project.

---------------------------
**6.  GETTING FREELORE DOCUMENTS

The FreeLore Bulletin is posted to:

comp.txt.sgml
alt.hypertext
alt.uu.future

At present the only documents
available are the Whitepaper
(enclosed), and back issues of
the Bulletin and Tracts.

Documents may be requested from

[e-mail]

===========================
The FreeLore Whitepaper                FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Version 1.0
23 January 1993

CONTACT:  John E. Goodwin, Moderator
          [e-mail]
          [phone] (voice)

(c) 1993 by The FreeLore Project.  You may create
and distribute verbatim copies of this document by
any means, provided this copyright notice is
included.

---------------
This document is the primary source of information
on the FreeLore Project.  It is intended to
provide a brief summary of the Project's Goals and
status for interested persons and publishers of
electronic journals.

---------------
WHAT IS FREELORE?

Freelore is a concept, not a product.

A short definition of Freelore would be:

  Any copylefted, useful information that is
  either stored in electronic format or is
  derived from electronic format.

Copylefting means appending a copyright notice to
your material that allows fair, non-commercial
use, including at least the right to distribute
complete, verbatim copies of your work.
Copylefting makes your work "freely
redistributable" (FR) without placing it in the
public domain (PD).

Thus "free" means that you are free to distribute
the materials, not that it is necessarily free of
charge.  The FreeLore Project and other writers of
freelore *will* try to make materials available
at no cost.  Distribution and printing costs will
unfortunately limit this no-cost distribution to
electronic means.

The second component of the word "freelore" is
"lore."  Lore means "useful information in a form
that can be directly interpreted by humans."  Lore
is not limited to books or written materials.  It
can encompass any medium whose output can be
directly perceived, such as video images or sound
recordings.  Lore does not have to be stored
electronically, although as a practical
requirement freelore must be stored on and derived
from electronic or magnetic media.

To be considered freelore, your work must (a) be
useful and available, and (b) must have a
copyright that allows the work to be distributed
and copied freely for non-commercial purposes.
Such a copyright could look like:

   Copyright (c) 1993 by <The Author>.  All Rights Reserved.

   <The Author>
   <Contact Info>

   You may make verbatim copies of this document for
   non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that
   this notice appears on all such copies.

In addition, you may allow others to create
derivative works by using an extended version:

   You may make verbatim copies of this document
   for non-commercial purposes by any means,
   provided that this notice appears on all such
   copies and that any changes to such copies or
   the original are clearly marked as such, and
   the changes, or a revised version of the
   document, are sent to the copyright holder.

   Commercial use may be permitted under some
   circumstances.  Contact the copyright holder
   for details.

If you use the longer form, you should include contact
information after your name (a good idea anyway).

The advantage of such a copyright is that it makes
the work freely available, but does not make it
Public Domain.  You do not lose control over your
work, and might still use it as the basis of an
enhanced version sold commercially, later on.
If you place your work in the Public Domain, anyone
can change it as they please without your
consent and even sell it.

The copyright can be held by the original author,
an organization, or a trust.  The legitimate use
of a copyright is to ensure the integrity
(technical or artistic) of your work; it is not to
restrict the free flow of information.

It is not in the spirit of freelore to restrict
fair use of your work in the copyright notice.  By
implication, the format of your work must be
publicly accessible, either in a standard encoding
such as U.S. ASCII, ISO 646, or Latin-1; if the
material is in a binary format, then it must be
accessible by FR software.

FREELORE PROJECT MISSION

The main goal of the FreeLore Project (as distinct
from the concept of freelore) is to create a body
of educational materials that can be used by
anyone with access to electronic technology.

  MANIFESTO:  The time has come for users of electronic
  technology the world over to have access to free
  educational materials in all fields.

We call the educational materials explicitly
created by the FreeLore Project, and the standards
they adhere to, "FreeLore", to distinguish them
from the more generic concept of freelore.  Our
"product" will adhere to certain standards
designed to ensure it will be useful and widely
distributed.  It is our intent to create a model
for other developers of freelore.

Our materials are not intended as a substitute
for proprietary materials, but a supplement to
them.  We believe it should be possible to acquire
basic knowledge in any field, through at least the
early university level, using FR materials on a
personal computer or workstation.

Creating freelore is like setting aside land for a
national park; it is a sacrifice some members of
society make so that the society as a whole can
benefit.  The future will judge our society on how
well we use our resources for the benefit of all.

The secondary goals of the FreeLore Project
include providing FR software, support services
like cataloguing and markup, and information on
markup languages.  By our software efforts and by
providing information, we encourage the development
of distribution channels for FR materials.

The FreeLore Project encourages the creation of
freelore that is marked up in generally accepted
markup languages, such as TeX and the ISO Standard
Generalized Markup Language (SGML).  We are
actively working to make SGML technology
accessible to the computer-user of limited means.

The FreeLore Project also supports the creation of
FR software to support hypertext, multimedia
materials, and so on.  We especially support
software that brings these technologies to low-end
PC and workstation users.

ORGANIZATION

The FreeLore Project is entirely decentralized.
Anyone can create freelore, call it freelore, and
distribute it by any means.  The FreeLore Project
exists to help and encourage the production of FR
materials congruent with the project's educational
goals, to promote knowledge of freelore, and to
encourage distribution of freelore.

The central administration consists of a steering
committee of five persons:

 John Goodwin,Moderator [e-mail]
 Gary Benson            [e-mail]
 Richard Kim            [e-mail]
 Gavin Nicole           [e-mail]
 (last position vacant)

There are presently a number of working groups,
supported by internet mailing lists.  See below
under mailing lists.

FREELORE SOFTWARE SUPPORT FOR MARKUP

  Interim Standard

The FreeLore Project has a serious bootstrapping
problem: there is no FR software for marking up
our own documentation in SGML or creating the
educational materials we want.  The FreeLore
Project therefore supports the various dialects of
TeX as an interim standard.  TeX is the most
mature markup language supported by FR software.
We will continue to support the conversion path
from SGML to TeX as one way to get a printable
document, even after the final standard (SGML) has
been adopted.

We especially encourage the creation of documents
in the Texinfo dialect, the GNU Project language
for creating a document that can be viewed using
GNU Info, in addition to being printed as a TeX
file.  Texinfo documents can contain embedded
statements, such as equations, in plain TeX or
LaTeX.  Later, we will support Texinfo to SGML
conversion and provide other browsers besides
Info.  During the interim period, we have adopted
GNU software's coding and documentation standards,
including Texinfo, for internal purposes.

  Final Standard

The FreeLore Project will support SGML markup.
Our goal is to create FR software that will be
fully SGML compliant in the sense of ISO 8879,
i.e. parse SGML directly, not just certain DTDs.
Our goal is to support all the features of SGML in
at least some of our software.  We also intend to
write FreeLore manuals describing how to mark up
documents.

PROJECTS RELATED TO FREELORE

FSF and GNU Project - aiding the Free Software
Foundation and the GNU's Not Unix Project by
producing compatible text-processing software is
one of the main goals of the FreeLore Project.

TEI and Davenport Group - We are tracking the Text
Encoding Initiative and Davenport Group; we urge
those projects to converge, so that there will not
be one standard for academic works in the
Humanities and another for Scientific and
Technical works.  What should a multimedia
scholarly work look like?

Gutenberg - We support the creation of electronic
versions of Public Domain texts; we also support
making these texts widely available at little or
no cost, and marking them up as FreeLore.

WWW - We would like our final DTD to support the
World Wide Web, a project that incorporates the
functionality of anonymous FTP, WAIS, and Gopher
into a single, FR server.

FREELORE PROJECT MAILING LISTS

You may join any of the following mailing lists.
Enquirers are automatically placed on the first
three.

To join a mailing list, contact

John Goodwin
[e-mail]

Your first message should say who you are
and what your area of interest is.  Your
message will be sent to all persons on the
list and you will receive a distribution
list.  For now, you contact other members
on the list yourself.  The moderator will
not act as an E-mail repeater.

Eventually each list will have its own
moderator and a mail server will be provided.

  >>THE FREELORE PROJECT IS IN DESPARATE NEED OF
  A MAIL SERVER.  IF YOU CAN DONATE A SERVER AND
  SOME DISK SPACE, EITHER TO DISTRIBUTE OUR
  DOCUMENTS AND SOURCE CODE OR TO STORE CONTRIBUTED
  FREELORE, CONTACT US.

Here are the mailing lists:

   FL-ANNOUNCE Press Releases and Product
        announcements

   FL-BULLETIN Normal means of communicating
        project status

   FL-INFO What is freelore and what is the
FreeLore Project?

   FL-CONNECTIVITY FreeLore as it relates to BBS
        and E-Journals

   FL-COPYRIGHT Moral, Political, and Legal
        issues

   FL-AUTHORS Support for authors using SGML or
        our software

   FL-INFORMAION-RETRIEVAL Cataloguing and
        Software Development for storing and
        retrieving freelore; support for WAIS and
        the World Wide Web

   FL-TEXINFO Support for authors writing general
        interest materials about freelore using
        the interim standard

   FL-SOFTWARE Software developers with the
        following sublists:

   o FL-BROWSER sublist SGML Browser
          (character-mode and X)

   o FL-DTD sublist Document Type Definition
          writers

   o FL-EDITOR sublist SGML Editors
          (character-mode and X)

   o FL-MULTIMEDIA sublist SGML Browser and Editor
          for Hytime

   o FL-SMALL-SYSTEMS sublist Concerns of small
          system owners and porting issues

   o FL-XWINDOWS sublist X window group

FREELORE PUBLICATIONS

The FreeLore Project provides information in the
following areas:

  Finding freelore on the Internet;

  How to create Freely Redistributable Materials;

  How to mark up texts with Standard Generalized
Markup Lanugages; and

  Other related international projects.

Presently available and planned publications
include:

  The FreeLore Whitepaper (this document)

  The FreeLore Copyleft Handbook (in preparation)

  The FreeLore Guide to Related Projects
       (volunteer needed)

  The FreeLore Guide to the Internet
       (volunteer needed)

  The FreeLore SGML Handbook
      (volunteer needed)

FREELORE PERIODICALS

  The FreeLore Bulletin (quasi-monthly
        announcements of interest to FreeLore
        Project members)

  The FreeLore Tracts (articles by Project
       participants)

EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS PLANNED

      We need writers of FR educational materials
to tell us about them.

SERVICES PROVIDED VIA INTERNET

      We need volunteers and organizers for these
services:

  Distribution of FreeLore by mail servers or
       anon. FTP

  Markup Services (Internet documents, Hypertext)

  Cataloguing and Registration Service for FR materials

SOFTWARE PLANNED OR NEEDED BY THE PROJECT

We need volunteers for all projects:

  Design a DTD for Texinfo (John Goodwin and the
       FL-DTD group)  This will be a superset of
       Texinfo, with some enhancements.

  Texinfo to SGML converter with support for World
       Wide Web (volunteer)

  Character-oriented browser for SGML (volunteer)

  X-Window browser for SGML (volunteer)

  Hytime DTD and browser (volunteer)

  Character-oriented editor for SGML markup
     (volunteer)

  X-Window editor for SGML markup (volunteer)

To get started on any project, obtain a copy of
the ISO 8879 standard (SGML) or Charles Goldfarb's
SGML Handbook, (Oxford University Press, 1990),
ISBN 0-19-853737-9 and a copy of James Clark's SGMLS parser
(based on Goldfarb's earlier ARCSGML) from:

    ftp.ifi.uio.no SIGHyper/SGMLUG/distrib or
    mailer.cc.fsu.edu (128.186.6.103) pub/sgml/SGMLS.

You should also try to get a WWW client and/or
server running at your site.

Telnet info.cern.ch or another of the sites listed
below and login as www for more information.

World Wide Web sites:

    info.cern.ch (128.141.201.74)  [SWISS]
    eies2.njit.edu (128.235.1.43)  [US]
    vms.huji.ac.il (128.139.4.3)   [ISRAEL]
    info.funet.fi (128.214.6.100)  [FINLAND]

GETTING INFORMATION ABOUT THE FREELORE PROJECT

  INTERNET E-MAIL

    John Goodwin
    [e-mail]

  USENET NEWSGROUPS

    comp.txt.sgml
    alt.hypertext
    alt.uu.future

  INTERNET ANONYMOUS FTP

    alt.uu.future is archived on nic.funet.fi

    You will have difficulty getting through from
    the U.S. and probably should not try.  We need
    information from anyone who is archiving this
    newsgroup or willing to make our documents
    available in the U.S. We have had one offer
    for interim help (1 MB storage), but have been
    unable to verify it.  We will publish details
    in a later bulletin.  At the moment, if you
    have the Whitepaper and the latest number of the
    bulletin, you have basically everything that
    is up to date.

  BULLETIN BOARDS

    We hope to have a list of BBS carrying
    information about The FreeLore Project in the
    next update of this paper.

-------------(end of FreeLore Whitepaper)---------