=========================== FreeLore Bulletin No. 3 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 19 January 1993 CONTACT: John Goodwin, Moderator Fermilab jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov +1 708 840 8069 (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 jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov Gary Benson inc@tc.fluke.com Richard Kim richard@blazers.tv.tek.com Gavin Nicole nick@nsis.cl.nec.co.jp 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: server@hermes.acm.rpi.edu, 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 jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov 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 jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov