CDF: Why, what and where

11

Author: JT Smith

John Everitt writes: “CDF is the documentation for a free language project. Not computer language, but natural 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.

Frankly, if Coup de foudre blocks a patent or two then I’m happy ;-).

Category:

  • Migration