John Everitt
writes:
CDF is
the documentation for a free language project. Not computer
language, but natrual language. What relevance has this got to open
source?. I believe it about time that something like the GPL
applied to the most basic lingual tools. RMS has a lot to answer
for…
In a nutshell the idea is to pool all information about a word,
or paragraph into one place (including references from FAQs,
dictionaries and thesaurus), add a Wiki plug-in and rope the whole
bundle of love together with XML.
So say you want to look up ‘Free Software’, the idea would be
that you could get the multiple definitions and distinctions with
two or three clicks in an ordinary browser. That’s the ideal. The
ability for anyone, regardless of cash, nationality and standard of
reading may be able to understand anything written on the net.
Now that Linux is becoming an industry standard, the possibility
exists to run this kind of software on quite basic hardware for the
minimum of cost.
I’ve had a think and put together a document
and project page
at Savannah, after taking a
whole lot of constructive criticism about the original
document.
The document itself is licensed under the GNU free documentation
license. It is compressed (along with its source) with GZIP and
Tar. A PDF version is included in the archive for your
convienience.
This is an appeal to the community as a whole, I beleive this is
important, I hold no patent on the idea, the documentation is free
to use and I beleive this is in the spirit of Lacklider. This
doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing Slashdot is interested in – I
tried, it appears this was not picked up. Instead (on Slashdot) you
can read how to animate LILO (not that GRUB isn’t far more
usable).
Frankly, if Coup de foudre blocks a patent or two then I’m happy
;-).