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cheers! I worked on this project - it was about 1995 -1997 so really fun to see it's still alive and useful. All praise to the Arts and Humanties Data Service for keeping it up there.

So for folks wondering why it's so basic - a little more info.. short answer: it was a small project and it was about ten years ago.

I think we started about 1995 or 1996 - description here. Pat Batley is a visionary librarian who could see the value of digitisation and pushed to get archive resources digitised. She got in contact with my boss in our small research group in the London College of Printing (about 4 people), and got him on board. So the project's original goal (as far I know) was to put ten years of Design magazine on CD-ROMs (this was 1994, 95? so CD-ROMs were still the way to go...). We got funded for a project manager and a couple of assistants and these guys scanned page by page all ten years, about 12,000 pages. Then ran the scans through an OCR program and then manually proof read them. We poured this into the database and produced the CD-ROMs. Towards the end of the programme (about 1996, 97) we decided it would be cool to put it online, it was a hack. So hence the very minimal web pages. Very limited time and money towards the end of the project and in 1997 it didn't look so bad! Plus the main thing we wanted was high res images of each of the pages, as the design of the journal itself as well as the content was important to archive (hence full pages rather than just the images). So the ascii text underneath we felt was fine, people could refer to the images of the whole pages for information about the layout. Would be great to update the site, anybody fancy sending some funding to AHDS? :-)

But I'm really glad we did it because the web feels a lot better place right now than CD-ROMs for it to be on, and those Design editions cover an amazing period of the journal itself and what was going on in the world at the time. Take a look at the difference between the 1965 issues and the 1974 issues for how the magazine itself changes.

Cheers for your positive feedback! ten years later and it's still alive and useful, I'm really pleased. Enjoy :-)

Good Lord.

A hydrogen-powered Hillman Imp.

What will they think of next?!

When you look at it, you wonder why the US designers are so retarted to design ugly stuff like the KSR-33.

That Olivetti unit looks like it was made 20 years later...

I found this other article even more interesting - 1974, issue 311, "In Praise of Hydrogen." It talks about how easily the School of Automotive Studies converted a traditional internal combustion engine to hydrogen, and how with only one major area of research (storage of hydrogen) we should expect our dependance on gasoline to be quickly and easily eliminated.

Talk about vaporware (pun not intended, though also funny).

http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/diad_search.html Thanks! Quite a resource (for some of us).

Yeah, 1969 was about the last time attractive women in skirts were seen anywhere near a data center... :)

...is like them officially stating they will start cooperating with other businesses?


For those who like text only format, you can go to the Oxford Text Archive for all of your ASCII & html fun...
http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/ (browse by title)

Tom.

See the horrendous terms and conditions of the Oxford Text Archive for an example of a 'free' book archive which isn't really free at all.

If we can take their page images, and process them into a Project Gutenberg text through the Distributed Proofreading site, *then* it will be of benefit to humanity.

There is already a quite lively trade going on in "open source" books. The Gutenburg Project (http://www.gutenberg.net) has a long history of archiving expired copyright texts in ascii. I built a simple XML tag set for these and some macros in my favorite editor and created an XML document and a couple of stylesheets that I use to transform those into html or PDF using formatting objects.

I later found that the Oxford Text Archive (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/) has done something similar but much more extensive with a large markup language and XLST files for converting to html. It wouldn't take too much mork to create the FO to generate PDF.

I read the html texts on my Pilot with one of the freeware transformer/browsers. I am one of those types who holds an almost sacred relationship with books. I have found while reading on my Pilot is not quite as aesthetically pleasing an experience as reading a paper and cloth text, it has one of the most essential aspects of it, portability. I can read it in bed.

I have also started to author simple texts in the same manner. Writing poetry seems to fit better the hierarchical structure of XML and flows better than prose. Nonfiction outline type material (most academic style writing) works flows pretty naturally as well. Telling the story in writing with XML markup is disastrous. It really interrupts my thought process.

In my experience the motivating experience for most authoring is to "share" with the notable exception of "how-to" books of all genres including those saints of the Open Source movement, O'Reilly & Assoc.. If the point is to share a story, an explanation of research or an idea or a thought or image, it seems we have overcome the impediment economic motivation. It is a gift economy type of thing.

Most academic journals in my experience are fantastically expensive for a subscription but make no money for their sponsors. It is the intermediary activities, not the authoring or editing (those are largely volunteer activities), that add this expense. I also think that most fiction authors write out the love the "telling" of the story in the authoring event rather than the recognition and fame. Who knows what possesses poets to write but it isn't for money.

Academic, scholarly writing has been essentially open source for centuries. There are well known rules for citation and formal and informal sanctions against improper appropriation prior work.

So an Open Book movement is already well underway and not that differnet a paradigm from what has proceeded it. It seems, then, that all that is required is the standardization of an authoring and reading infrastructure with tools that are already in hand. Let those who seek to publish from economic motivations worry about the economics of printing and or distribution. For an interesting take on this see the goReader (http://www.goreader.com) electronic text book.

Well, my point was kind of different. Trolls are a Norwegian company and copyright issues would be resolved in Oslo City Court. European copyright laws are different from American (I don't really know how)

Well, as a matter of fact I live in Europe, not in the US. The copyright laws are not really different. All countries that have signed the Berne copyright convention have implemented the same basic rules in their national laws. I do not think that Norway is different in that respect. For more informations about copyrights, you could have a look at:

• 10 Big Myths about copyright explained
• Copyright FAQ (UK)
• EFF Intellectual Property Archive

The last page contains lots of links to useful documents, including several copyright FAQs.

[...] and Trolls do not think that the "viral clause" would be effective in Norwegian court.

Now, this is another matter. It is not related to the copyright laws, but to the interpretation of the GPL. I have seen several statements by TrollTech employees saying that, in their opinion, "neither the GPL nor the LGPL legally protect libraries." However, you have to pay attention to the wording of these statements and what exactly is meant by "protect" in that context.

The GPL does protect the libraries in that it does not allow someone to distribute a compiled version of the library itself without the sources. It also prevents the distribution of a compiled program that links with this library, unless the sources are made available.

However, the GPL does not prevent the distribution of the sources of a program (or another library) that is under a restrictive license and links with the GPL'd or LGPL'd library. For example, I could release the sources of a program under a license that forbids non-commerical use (ha!) and tell the user to compile and link with the GPL'd library. The GPL does nothing against that, because it does not restrict the usage of the GPL'd code, only its distribution or modification. It this case, it would only be possible to distribute the sources or the program (separately from the library), but not the compiled code.

Also, the GPL allows you to use the code freely for your personal use (even for commercial purposes) as long as you do not re-distribute the code (compiled or not).

In his editorial, Eirik Eng says: "If the GPL effectively protected a GPLed library from being used to develop proprietary software, we would allow relicensing Qt under the GPL." As explained above, the GPL effectively prevents the distribution of binary-only programs linked with the library, because the compiled program is considered to be a derivative work as soon as it uses some code (macros, typedefs, ...) from the header files of the library. However, it does not prevent the distribution of source-only programs, and it does not prevent the development of proprietary software using the library as long as the software is not distributed.

Contrary to the GPL, the QPL does not allow the latter, and I think that this puts an unnecessary restriction on the usage of the software. Let's suppose that I am the owner of a small shop and I want to develop my own virtual cash register on my PC using Qt. Well, according to the QPL I would have to get a commercial license if I use this little application in my shop, because that would be a "commercial use". Depending on your point of view, you can consider this as a good or a bad feature of the QPL compared to the GPL.

So they cannot release Qt with GPL as an alternative license because they are afraid that it might ruin their business model, because anyone could then use Qt Free Edition in any project, proprietary or not

Well, of course TrollTech has to earn money somehow. But I do not think that the GPL would ruin their business model. With the GPL, anybody who distributes a program built on top of the library would have to release the sources as well (under the GPL or a compatible license). If by "proprietary" you mean "without sources" or "with a restrictive license, then no, the GPL would not allow that.