[10537] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Debating the NII "Truisms"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Sat Feb 26 18:39:05 1994
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 16:06:54 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: tenney@netcom.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Glenn S. Tenney's message of Sun, 13 Feb 1994 12:54:08 -0800 <199402132054.MAA00143@netcom9.netcom.com>
Yeah Glenn, I think that's the ticket. It would be great if the govt
simply focused their efforts (I realize some already are) on providing
info on the net that is already theirs and their charter to produce.
One primary reason I started The Online Book Initiative was not only
to provide text to end-users but also to provide a large, raw textbase
for those developing software to deal with large textbases. That's why
I have always emphasized sheer quantity over trying to produce
finished products that the public would find attractive (what that
means is I grab anything that looks relevant and put it up as I find
it, rather than slow down that release process by trying to first put
it into some "reasonable" format.)
Some of that thinking came out of personal conversations with Roger
Gregory who was then (and might still be tho it's winding down) one of
the principles with The Xanadu Project, hypertext and all that.
Projects like Gutenberg have taken texts from OBI, reformatted them
for ease of use, and distributed them. That's the idea I had in mind.
But finding and gathering texts into one area and letting people take
what they want for whatever purpose they wanted is something I saw as
a distinct and useful effort. I think much progress would be made if
the US and other Govts did the same and then worried about (or let
others worry about) format etc., otherwise it just slows down the
process by creating one limited bottleneck, and format etc can be done
after the material is made available if there is still a desire.
-Barry Shein
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