2002-10-05 20:20:49 +00:00
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<font size="+1">Our License</font>
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<p>
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<body>
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The <a href="thdl_license.txt">THDL Open Community License</a>
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is a free software license. The source code for our
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software is completely open and public. We hope that others will contribute and build
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upon what we've done, resulting in better, more useful products. The core of our license
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is the <a href="opl_license.txt">Open Public License</a> (OPL), which is also used by <a href="http://www.enhydra.com/">Enhydra</a>.
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The OPL is a slightly modified version of the popular <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mozilla1.0.html">
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Mozilla Public License</a>.
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<p>
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With this license, you can:
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<ol type="a">
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<p><li>Modify our software, provided the source code for these modifications remains open,
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and your changes are fully documented.
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<p><li>Use our software in proprietary projects, or build proprietary extensions to the
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software.
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</ol><p>
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Further, you must:
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<ol type="a">
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<p><li>Notify the THDL of your modifications.
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<p><li>Acknowledge our initial contribution, as well as others' later contributions.
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</ol>
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<p>
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As the creators of the software, our role is to keep track of developments and maintain
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the source code. In fact, however, our goals are much broader than this. In particular, we
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want to push the use standard technologies. Both Wylie Edit and Jskad take advantage of
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two technologies that have significant potential to bring those in Tibetan computing
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together.
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<p>
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On the one hand, our software uses Tony Duff's new cross-platform Tibetan Machine
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Web fonts. These are high-quality TrueType fonts, which are freely available and have
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been tested and run identically on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms. Documents
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created on one platform will transfer unproblematically to any other platform. We hope
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that by encouraging the use of and building infrastructure around these fonts, we can help
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to promote a dominant and well-supported encoding format, which means less
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information lost in the long run.
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<p>
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On the other hand, our software implements the THDL Extended Wylie Transliteration
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Standard, our version of Extended Wylie. THDL Extended Wylie provides simple ASCII
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correspondences for all Tibetan characters, including ways to represent Sanskrit stacks as
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well as punctuation and many special characters. Until Unicode is a viable solution for
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Tibetan computing, Extended Wylie is the best standard, logical, and platform-
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independent solution for Tibetan data storage.
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<p>
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Combining these two technologies, we have created a Microsoft Word add-in and a Java
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application for typing and editing Tibetan, as well as converting back and forth between
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Extended Wylie and Tibetan Machine Web. Together, this software represents a uniform
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and consistent solution to Tibetan text input, which is available on any platform and also
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over the web. Many projects could benefit from this work, as well as customize it to meet
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their specific needs.
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<p>
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Although our software is open, we want to promote the standards it employs. We don't
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want our Extended Wylie keyboard to become "just another keyboard". Rather, we hope
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it will become the Wylie keyboard, one that will become familiar to everyone in Tibetan
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computing.
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<p>
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This is not to say that we at the THDL are allowed to fix the details of the Extended
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Wylie transliteration system. What we have arrived at represents a carefully thought out
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system, but certainly not the final answer. It remains a work in progress, and we hope that
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everyone in Tibetan computing will play a role in shaping the system. We want to hear
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your feedback, and thus to shape the standard together. What we don't want is a
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profileration of multiple, differing implementations.
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<p>
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We hope that you will find this software useful. If you are a software developer, we hope
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that this license is to your liking, and that you will join us in trying to create a community
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of standards for Tibetan computing.
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</body>
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</html>
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