=========================== The FreeLore Whitepaper FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Version 1.0 23 January 1993 CONTACT: John E. Goodwin, Moderator jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov +1 708 840-8069 (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 . All Rights Reserved. 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 jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov Gary Benson inc@sisu.fluke.com Richard Kim richard@blazers.tv.tek.com Gavin Nicole nick@nsis.cl.nec.co.jp (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 jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov 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 jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov 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)---------