This is an example of how to write a freely redistributable document. To be a good primer, it needs more, much more.
Open editing involves the freedom to create, modify, and distribute documents. It has has technical, legal, trust, and social issues.
We can handle the technical, legal, and trust issues. Unfortunately, social problems remain.
There are several aspects to the technical.
In addition, to help novices and to make work and cooperation even easier, I would like to see an editor or word processor that shows at least two of the surface expressions simultaneously with the deep representation.
(See http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/multiple-output-preview.html.)
Moreover, I would like to see easy bibliographic mechanisms, such as those in BibTeX. Perhaps sgml based formats, such as xml, should be adapted and replace Texinfo. Fortunately, none of these actions is necessary.
Legal problems have been solved by applying old laws to new circumstances. But an underlying question remains: for how long should the enabling law be enforced? (See Legal Solutions: Different Licenses.)
Technological advances have enabled us to create inexpensive new filters for credibility, to include many more people in the process, and to exclude the dangerous. Modern trust building mechanisms exist. They can be improved and adapted. (See Trust.)
Unfortunately, society has not solved the social problems that have come with people's desire to take advantage of the new technologies of the past half century. Instead individuals continue with old habits and corporations continue with old business models.
Thus, many contemporary people write for just one output format. Similarly, many corporations sell inexpensive and non-rivalrous products as if they were expensive and rivalrous. (See The Social Problems.)
For success, we must overcome these hinderances.
In the past, people wrote with pen, pencil, or typewriter for a sighted audience. They wrote on paper and they had copies printed on paper. Paper was the one significant form that output could take. The only salient blind were the permanently blind and they are a small portion of the population.
Nowadays, paper is just one medium. Besides paper, people read on various kinds of electronic display. Or they listen. In the past, one `surface expression' was salient, that of pen or print on paper. Now several different `surface expressions' are salient.
The three major renderings are the high resolution, typeset format for printing on paper; HTML for Web pages; and Info for efficient online reading or listening. These are the surface expressions of a deep represention.
On a computer, plain text is common; most often, it is displayed in a fixed-width font. I am not going to talk about plain text here, except as an occasional output format.
For printed, typeset output on paper, the DVI, PDF, or PostScript output formats are common. These same outputs can also be viewed on an electronic display. (These files are created by the TeX, LaTeX, debiandoc2dvi, or texi2dvi commands using overtly marked text.)
The HTML of the World Wide Web is often viewed on an electronic display. (HTML files are created with the latex2html, debiandoc2html, and makeinfo commands.)
Unlike paper output, in which the reader sees the design that the creator intended, World Wide Web output is formatted as the reader desires; the writer specifies only the content and the designer only hints.
Unfortunately, HTML does not distinguish between links within and without a document. This means that no one can search documents more than one electronic page long; no one can navigate efficiently.
When a Web document is limited to a single page, you can move around it comfortably and efficiently; but if not, you are stuck.
Moreover, people often fail to think of a search command as a movement command, even though it is.
Worse, many people are accustomed to search commands in which you must decide your string before you search. This means that the search fails when you type too little.
A better user interface, for both searching and navigation, offers incremental search. As you type characters, they add to the search string and are found. Even though incremental search has existed for more than a human generation, only recently has it entered the browser world.
A third output format, Info, does distinguish between references that are to locations within a document and those without. This means that you can move through a multi-page document readily.
(Info files are created with the debiandoc2info and makeinfo commands.)
The Texinfo and DebianDoc packages offer commands for generating all renderings. Other packages do not.
Every appropriately marked up document produced with a computer has multiple renderings in addition to the deep representation in which it is stored electronically. (Inappropriately marked up documents are limited; they may only format to one rendering.)
The three renderings of an appropriately marked up document are the high resolution, typeset format for printing on paper, usually DVI, PDF, or PostScript; HTML for Web pages; and Info for efficient online reading and listening.
Info provides a good listening format for Emacspeak. In effect, the text-to-speech mechanism provides a fourth rendering. (Emacspeak provides an audio desktop; it is different than a screen reader. It is also different from Emacs from which it derives. Of the four types of user integrating environment common today, command line, graphic, virtual lisp machine, and audio, Emacs is the third and Emacspeak the fourth.)
Consider a book: it consists of words (and perhaps images). Often, nowadays, it comes only in one surface expression, that of a typeset, printed book. But the words can be typed into a computer.
It takes editing to create a decent deep representation. But once that is done, you can produce a typeset and printed book, a frugal format for reading or listening online, and a typeset Web page, all with commands that take less than a second to give.
When you do not offer both the auditory and the frugal, you exclude the `situationally blind', such as car drivers, who should keep their eyes on the road. And you exclude people who suffer from low bandwidth connections or who are using old or small devices, such as cell phones or PDAs.
As time passes, low bandwidth connections should become faster and small devices more powerful. It will become less and less important to be frugal. However, over the next few years, the number of `situationally blind', will blossom. People driving will want to listen. For those with cell phones or PDAs the technology for listening already exists. For those with laptops, listening is simply a matter of downloading, installing, and learning existing free software.
Texinfo1 is a documentation system that uses a single source file to produce both online information and printed output. This means that instead of writing multiple documents, one for the printed work, a second for the Web site, and a third for Info, you need write only one document. Therefore, when the work is revised, you need revise only that one document.
Emacspeak enables Info to provide a fourth rendering to which you listen.
Unfortunately, many people treat computers as if they were 19th century typesetting machines that display printed output immediately. Worse, some programs offer a single, frozen typeset output in a wysiwyg or `What You See Is What You Get' interface.
In wysiwyg interface, authors specify the document layout interactively while typing. Writers often specify the layout of a printed document by italicizing technical terms and the like. They impose structure on a document by typesetting it for printing.
In contrast the programs for Texinfo, as well as for DebianDoc, html, xml, sgml, TeX, and LaTeX impose structure by themselves. The writer tells the various formatters that a chapter title is a chapter title, that examples of code are examples of code, and so on. Computer programs do the presentation.
Thus, a computer program specifies in which voice to speak for titles, in which for examples of code, and in which for body text. For a printed document, it specifies in which fonts to typeset code, titles, and body text. You can, of course, tell the computer which font or which voice goes with which circumstance. But you need not tell it every time.
Currently, programs that help you write a Texinfo document do not show the various output expressions immediately. I would like to see an editor or word processor that shows at least two of the surface expressions simultaneously with the Texinfo deep representation.
See http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/multiple-output-preview.html
Fortunately, such a program is nice but not necessary.
A Texinfo file consists of content plus markup.
You can learn many Texinfo commands. But most simply, you adapt `boiler plate' for the beginning and use a few commands in chapters and sections. That is all.
Regardless of output format, most people write documents with the same structure. People tend to write a book, for example, in a specific order with chapters, sections, paragraphs, and sentences. Texinfo offers more freedom although few make use of it. An online expression need not have the same order or the same contents as a printed expression. You can see this in the Emacs manual.
However, many helper programs presume a standard format for all output expressions, whether read in a book, viewed online, or heard.
Texinfo mode in GNU Emacs provides quick ways to update a Texinfo file and to insert the most frequently used commands.
Also regardless of output format, you may choose which content to format. For example, if you are teaching in Massachusetts and are preparing documents for your students, you can choose to format the text of a Massachusetts law. On the other hand, if you are teaching in Texas, you can choose to format the text of a not-quite similar Texan law.
Texinfo provides two ways to select. The arch version control system provides a third (see Arch).
To write a document, adapt `boiler plate' for the beginning. Specify filename, title, author or authors, and copyright or copyrights.
For the content itself, you need to learn a few of the structuring commands so you can divide the work into chapters and sections. In addition, you may want to learn how to emphasize words, how to make cross references, and how to make index entries.
The Texinfo formatting commands automatically generate a table of contents. If you have made index entries and created the position for an index by inserting another stretch of boiler plate, the formatting commands will automatically generate an index, too.
If you wish, you can create footnotes, citations, and tables, and include images for various sorts for your different output formats. You can do a lot. But that takes more learning.
Texinfo commands start with `@', an `at-sign'. To tell the computer what a command covers and what it does not, inline commands employ braces around the command arguments, { ... }. Commands that go on a line by themselves do not need or use braces.
Two other common mark up languages, html and xml, use angle brackets, < ... >, instead of at-signs. (html is used for Web pages.) html and xml derive from their predecessor, sgml (used in DebianDoc), which was invented in the same decade, the 1970s, as the predecessor to Texinfo.
In addition to the commands embedded in the `boiler plate', the basic Texinfo commands are these:
@node@chapterTexinfo provides more heading commands than `chapter': it provides
section and subsection commands (and subsubsection commands too).
Also, it provides the equivalents for unnumbered chapters (called
@unnumbered, @unnumberedsec) and for appendices. The
numbered and unnumbered chapters and appendices are listed in the
table of contents. In addition, there is an unnumbered equivalent
that does not appear in the table of contents.
The only two commands you need to learn early on are @node and
@chapter.
For more detail, see Structuring Command Types.
@emph@strong@emph and @strong commands.
The @strong command emphasizes text strongly. For paper
typesetting, the @emph command usually prints in italics and
the @strong command prints in bold. Emacspeak uses different
voices.
For more detail, see Emphasizing Text.
@samp@code@samp; to show a sample of code,
use @code. Texinfo has a more than a dozen highlighting commands.
You will use only a few frequently. You need not remember them all; although it is useful to know which exist.
For more detail, see Marking Words and Phrases.
@xref@xref. Besides
@xref, there are four more variations for particular
situations, such as the last part of a sentence.
Use @uref to produce a reference to a uniform resource locator
(a url).
See Cross References.
@bye@bye.
Of course, you can, if you wish, learn more. For example, the
previous two colum table used the @table and @end
table commands. Neither of those commands took braces; each stood on
a line by itself.
You can format examples with @example and @end
example, although I sometimes prefer the equivalent commands,
@smallexample and @end smallexample, which typeset
text in a smaller font.
There are many more `block enclosing commands' (see Block Enclosing Commands). Like the highlighting commands, these need not be learned, although it is useful to know which exist.
Perhaps the most critical additional command is the one for quotations.
@quotation ... @end quotationPersonally, I like emphasising what I quote, so I usually write:
@quotation
@emph{Text of quotation}
@end quotation
Since examples and quotations often fit within paragraphs, it is a
good idea to put @noindent on the line just preceeding the
next part so that a formatter does not inadvertently indent the text
as a new paragraph. (You may turn off such indentation altogether, as
I have done for this document, but not everyone likes that. Since it
is easy to turn on such indentation, I have kept the @noindent
commands in the Texinfo deep representation.)
See @noindent: Omitting Indentation.
Other useful commands are @footnote and @cite.
(See Footnote Commands, and @cite.)
You can cause the various formatters to ignore a block of text with
the @ignore ... @end ignore command, or to
ignore the rest of a line with the @c or @comment
command. You can put in an elipsis, three dots, ..., with the
@dots{} command. Since this command works within a line,
it includes empty braces so the formatters can easily find the end of
the command.
There are three ways to cause the various formatters to include or exclude specific parts of the overall text.
@ifset and @ifclear,
@include, and
The first two methods are built into Texinfo.
The first method uses the @set and @clear commands to
specify which parts to include or exclude. I used those commands to
mark another document whose Texinfo deep representation is
GNU-GPL-and-Commentaries.texi. The specific parts to be
included or excluded are marked with
@ifset ... @end ifset and
@ifclear ... @end ifclear.
The second method enables you to include files as include chapters
with the @include command. That is how this document is
written. When you comment out a chapter with @c, that chapter
is excluded. (Incidentally, when you use the @include
command, all the included files must be at the level of chapter.
Moreover, you must update the document with
texinfo-multiple-files-update rather than
texinfo-all-menus-update and save all the files.)
The third method uses the arch version control system (see Arch).
You can use dvi or pdf or Postscript files for printing,
To format the Texinfo deep representation for this document to dvi, use
texi2dvi open-editing.texi
For PDF, use
texi2pdf open-editing.texi
For Postscript, you must first create a dvi file and then convert it:
dvi2ps open-editing.dvi > open-editing.ps
For Info, for Web sites, and for plain text, use makeinfo
Thus for Info, use
makeinfo open-editing.texi
However, I myself like the program to explain what it is doing,
--verbose, prefer one very long file rather than numerous short
ones (presuming the Texinfo file is long), --no-split, prefer
to wrap at a fill column that is two less than the default,
--fill-column=70, do not want to indent paragraphs,
--paragraph-indent=0, and prefer to force output even if the
file contains errors, --force.
So I use this command:
makeinfo --verbose --no-split --fill-column=70 \
--paragraph-indent=0 --force open-editing.texi
Naturally, I do not type all those letters — I hate typing. I simply copy the command from some other file and change the file name.
I format a Web page with this command:
makeinfo --verbose --no-split --html open-editing.texi
And I format a plain text file with this one;
makeinfo --verbose --no-split --fill-column=70 \
--paragraph-indent=0 --force \
--no-headers --output=open-editing.txt open-editing.texi
To see or listen to a file in Info, I use the info command in
GNU Emacs or in Emacspeak.
That command has a keybinding, which is `control-h i'.
(It goes without saying that I make sure my control key is to the left of my <a> key; some keyboards label that key as `Caps_Lock', as if they were labelling keys for an 1880s typewriter. No one in their right mind puts a Control anywhere else. In ancient times, stone masons built temples as if they were wood; these keylabelings are a contempary example of the same habit.)
When I have not specified the location of the Info file in the
appropriate dir file, such as /usr/local/info/dir, I
call the info command with a prefix, `control-u control-h i'.
(I never use the standalone Info command.)
To see a printed expression of the document on my screen I invoke one or the other of:
xdvi open-editing.dvi
gv open-editing.pdf
gv open-editing.ps
xpdf open-editing.pdf
Arch is a modern revision control system that grants developers the ability to work independently and merge code with one another when and if they choose.
Tom Lord wrote the current version, called tla (for `Tom Lord's
Arch').
If you are not familiar with revision control systems, please look athttp://www.gnuarch.org/web/gnu-arch/writings/what-is-revctl.html.
For an introduction that is good for someone new, see http://wiki.gnuarch.org/Quick_20Introduction.
It may be followed by Tom Lord's tutorial: http://regexps.srparish.net/tutorial-tla/arch.html.
If you are are accustomed to an older revision control system such as CVS, please remember that
archis modern. It will be unfamiliar because of its additional capabilities, such as easy branching and merging.
You can check out a project from someone else or start your own.
Either way, arch makes it easy to cooperate with others.
The sources, whether originally from you or someone else need not be in a directory (or `folder' as some people say) below the directory with the archive-name, although they can be.
It is a good idea to put your first archive, as named with archive-name, under a more general directory, so you can have several archives.
Note that an archive itself can have just one project in it, named with archive-name, or several.
At the beginning, the naming and such may seem complex; that is
because arch is designed for projects that grow.
As an initial step, I will talk about getting a project from elsewhere.
First, you need to tell tla who you are:
tla my-id "Robert J. Chassell <bob@rattlesnake.com>"
By convention, your arch id is an email address along
with your name.
To check out a project from elsewhere, such as tla, you need to
register that archive so tla can learn its location:
tla register-archive http://www.seyza.com/archives/lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004
This results in a message saying
Registering archive: lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004
You can check that it is registered and its location with:
tla archives
To download the project's source code, you need;
For example,
lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004
bob@rattlesnake.com--2005-law-keynote
stefan@xsteve.at--public-2005
For example,
http://www.seyza.com/archives/lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004
file://home/u/Legal-center-speech
http://arch.xsteve.at/2005
For example,
tla--devo--1.3
legal-keynote--main--0.1
xtla--main--1.1
(xtla is an Emacs mode for tla. 2005-law-keynote
refers to the text of my speech at the 2005 Conference for Law
School Computing.)
If you do not know the category, branch, and version of a project, you can discover them:
tla categories -A lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004
This results in a message saying
docs-tla
tla
Then
tla branches -A lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004 tla
tla versions -A lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004 tla--devo
which results in
tla--devo--1.3
Then you can switch to the directory that holds the repository
cd /usr/local/src/tla-1.3
and check more thoroughly
tla revisions --summary -A lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004
In my case that tells me:
base-0
Top Level Directory for tla mainline development config
patch-1
tla-1.3pre1 testing candidate release
patch-2
tla-1.3pre2 testing candidate release
patch-3
tla-1.3pre3 testing candidate release
version-0
tla-1.3 released!
Incidentally
tla revisions = tla logs + tla missing
You can run either of the other commands with the `--summary' option
tla logs -A lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004 --summary
tla missing -A lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004 --summary
In my case,
tla missing -A lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004 --summary
tells me nothing is missing — the command returns nothing at all. This means my repository is up to date. But let us suppose it were empty.
To get source the first time, give a tla get command:
tla get -A lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004 tla--devo--1.3
This, by the way, is the same as what you do to update your repository with others' work. I show updating in Updating from Others' Work.
The tla get command has options and two arguments; the second
argument may be left out. The
-A stefan@xsteve.at--public-2005 option tells
tla get where to retrieve the source.
The first argument is tla--devo--1.3. Its double dashes
separate the parts that tell arch the category, branch, and
version to retrieve. This is version 1.3 of the development branch.
The second argument, which may be left out, is the name of the destination directory. This would be the name of the directory into which the repository is going. I am not showing it in this case. Were I to move one directory level up, it would be tla-1.3.
In case the remote sources go away, you can cache the sources locally,
tla cacherev tla--devo--1.3--version-0
where the optional argument tells you which revision to cache. The revision name has four parts separated by double dashes: category, branch, version, and revision
You do not need to specify the revision: as the documentation says, “If no revision is specified, but the command is run from within a project tree, cache the latest revision ... ”
A mirror is useful if you work off line, but still want to make your
changes permantly public. A mirror is an online repository to which
you can write using the archive-mirror command and which others
can retrieve.
You cannot make ordinary commits to a mirror archive, since it is
designed to reflect your home system. Instead, the tla
archive-mirror command writes to it.
First, you need to make the mirror. Here is what I did with secure
ftp, sftp, onto an isp whose machines stay on the
Internet full time, unlike my home machine. The backslash followed by
a carriage return at the end of the first line is an old mechanism for
continuing the line without breaking it.
tla make-archive --listing --mirror bob@rattlesnake--2005-legal \
sftp://bob@shell.isp.net:/home/bob/www/archives/2005-legal
Second, you can update the mirror:
tla archive-mirror bob@rattlesnake--2005-legal
You may edit your sources.
Then there are two steps to putting modified sources into tla:
To do this, edit and invoke the appropriate commands:
tla make-log
tla commit
You can use the tla get command to update your own repository,
just as you can use it to get source the first time.
First, let us see what we have for the Emacs mode, xtla:
tla categories -A stefan@xsteve.at--public-2005
xtla
tla branches -A stefan@xsteve.at--public-2005 xtla
tla--dev
xtla--main
tla versions -A stefan@xsteve.at--public-2005 xtla--main
xtla--main--1.1
Then be sure to change to the directory that holds the xtla-main sources. (If you forget, as I did initially, you will confuse yourself.)
cd /usr/local/src/xtla-main
tla missing -A stefan@xsteve.at--public-2005
patch-22
patch-23
patch-24
patch-25
patch-26
patch-27
patch-28
patch-29
patch-30
patch-31
patch-32
I am missing quite a bit. I looked at a summary which I am not
showing here and then updated with the tla get command:
tla get -A stefan@xsteve.at--public-2005 xtla--main--1.1
`xtla--main--1.1' comes from the results of the tla
versions command and `-A' is the name of of the archive.
Rather than copy -A stefan@xsteve.at--public-2005 into your
command each time, you can set your default with a command such as
tla my-default-archive stefan@xsteve.at--public-2005
With the dropping cost of incremental and even initial production, restriction on writings serve primarly to hinder. The legal challenge is to enable people to stand tall rather than become victims.
Legally, how do you harness the power of police and courts to protect you and others, especially the small and the weak?
Although a computer program, a technical manual, and a poem are all bits on a computer, they have different characteristics to humans. For example, a computer program is like a cook's recipe, any part of which may change. A poem, on the other hand, is fixed.
Except as parody, you would not want to change Wordsworth's famous lines,
... all at once I saw a crowd A host of dancing Daffodills;
to
... all at once I saw a crowd A host of dancing Tulips;
by William Wordsworth
So a poem, like an editorial or a scientific paper, but unlike a computer program, is properly invariant. (You can make fair use changes regardless of license.)
For such a work, you can use a verbatim license. It should appear in the `@copying' section of a Texinfo document like this:
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire document is permitted
in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
Parts of a textbook, legal casebook, or technical manual are invariant, too, such as the introduction. The body, however, must be able to change.
The GNU Free Documentation License was designed for such a situation. You may specify invariant sections. Other sections may be modified; if modifications are made, they must be noted.
Moreover, since publishers seek monopoly or partial monopoly rather than change their business model to that of providing services like lawyers, the GFDL restricts you and me a little. You may require up to five words that you specify on the front cover and up to 25 words on the back cover, and if another publishes more than one hundred printed copies, that text must be included.
The GNU Free Documentation License was designed to balance competitive, free markets with hard copy publishers' desire for monopoly or partial monopoly. It offers a clear definition of what is `commercial'.
The various licenses employ copyright law. That is why they are so strong.
As Eben Moglen, who is a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School as well as the General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, points out,2
Licenses are not contracts: the work's user is obliged to remain within the bounds of the license not because she voluntarily promised, but because she doesn't have any right to act at all except as the license permits.
Licenses are enforced through police and courts. In the United States of America, according to its Constitution, the purpose of copyright is
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, ...
How long should police and courts enforce the license? Currently, in the U. S., the duration extends from President Herbert Hoover's time. Is this duration enough, not enough, or too much?
What if the time were limited to seven years? Would that be enough time?
I am told that nowadays in the United States, legal texts are priced higher than they would be in a competitive, free market. An economist would refer to the top three publishers, all foreign owned, as an oligopoly. (Incidentally, in school forty years ago, I was taught how to price fix in such an oligopoly without breaking U. S. law.)
Thus, in law schools, as John Mayer told me,3
... faculty teach, use each other's textbooks and improve on them in the classroom — but the chain is broken there. There is little opportunity and no incentive for a faculty member to contribute ideas, changes and refinements back to the author or publisher of the original textbook. There are a million ways to teach, but very few ways to teach something well.
Often, nowadays, a legal casebook comes in only one surface expression, that of a typeset, printed book. But the words can be typed into a computer. Indeed, many legal cases are already online; so is the United States Code.
With the advance of technology, textbooks and casebooks need not be limited to one rendering. Their production need not fit the desires of an oligopoly.
When you teach from or study a textbook or casebook, you must trust it. It does you no good if you are fooled into studying a falsehood. Organizations that distribute textbooks and casebooks must be trustworthy.
A fellow asked me,
How do I know exactly unless I was there?
My response was straightforward:
You don't.
That is the problem. You must depend on what others tell you. A writer citing laws and legal cases cannot go to all courts in session simultaneously; that writer cannot go to court sessions before he or she was born.
The only way to discover which laws were passed and what decisions were made is to trust others. Without trust, no one can succeed.
But then I pointed out that an advantage of the Internet is that organizations can use it to create inexpensive new forms of `credibility filter'.
You do not have to depend on the old mechanisms of banks, insurance companies, and encyclopedias, all of which were and still are trust based institutions (See http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/trust-based-institutions.html)
One modern mechanism is to provide tags tell you how others judge reputations. (And provide MD5 sums or an equivalent to ensure that you receive the information as intended.)
Take a look at how Slashdot does this. (Slashdot is an online news and commentary site for `nerds'. I am not saying that it provides the only or best mechanism, merely that its method is good enough for its forum. As far as I am concerned, Slashdot's level 5 items are far better than its level 1 and less than one-tenth as commonplace. To me, Slashdot shows how to provide reviewing services that are probabilistically OK. See http://slashdot.org/index.pl?mode=flat.)
The Slashdot trust-building mechanism makes use of randomly selected, temporary judges who also fit additional criteria. Basically, a judge, called a `moderator' in Slashdot, must be logged onto the system. (See http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml.)
Of course, if your effort is successful, many hostile people will log on, or a few people will log on with many aliases. Presume that millions of dollars can be spent in an attack against you . (Funding can come from PR and advertising, from an organization of believers, or from the covert operations budget of another country.)
The Slashdot mechanism requires that a judge be a long time regular and willing to serve. These characteristics are open to abuse by a well-funded opponent, but will force the opponent to spend more.
Also, a judge must be judged well by other judges. The practice is called metamoderation.
Each judge receives a number of points. Points expire three days after the last judgement. Moreover, each judgement costs a point. When a judge uses all his or her points or after they expire, he or she stops being a judge.
The latter conditions means that a fraud must first gain the respect of other judges and then wait until randomly chosen to be a judge. Obviously, a well funded opposition can undermine such a constitution, but that is expensive.
A similar trust-building mechanism can be applied elsewhere. A backstop, for example, enables trust-building to be applied to governance. Without a backstop, people will trust what they believe which may be quite foolish, as was the belief that tuberculosis germs could not develop resistance. (See http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/Choice-and-Constraint.html#Science.)
While some may disbelieve a particular investigator, temporary judges will know several. It is likely that temporary judges will not not know investigators personally, but they will have figured out whether to adapt their judgments to the results of those investigations.
And the rest of us can, probabilistically speaking, come to depend on these judgements.
Trust-building is not so necessary when an organizational system compensates: that is why is is useful to emply the Christian presumption that people are Fallen, even if you are not Christian. In politics, that presumption leads you to figure that `power corrupts' and to install various `checks and balances'. Otherwise, you will call for `virtuous rulers', yet find that you are ruled by frauds who pretend to be virtuous but are not.
But many governing systems lack checks and balances. Even with them, and with better policies, it helps to bear in mind, as Michael Froomkin said, that
... collaborative reputational systems can help identify who the group believes is advancing the debate and who is impeding it. ...
(See http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/GlobalFlow/paper/Froomkin.pdf and http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/petals-of-cooperation.html.)
So far and fortunately, advances in technology have enabled us to deal with the trust issues that arise as more and more people deal with strangers. We need to adapt our current institutions and create new ones to continue to benefit.
The social problems of open and freely redistributable documentation have not been solved. They have not been solved on a personal level and they have not been solved on a corporate level.
On a personal level, many contemporary people write for just one output format. This is from habit. In the past, people wrote onto paper, either with pen or typewriter. Paper was the one significant form that output could take. In the past, the only salient blind were the permanently blind, and they are a small portion of the population.
Put in a way that might appeal to those who like acronyms,
Yet today, many people think only of wysiwyg. They think of a `What You See Is What You Get' program that provides a single, frozen typeset output format. They do not think of a frugal but highly efficient online format or of a typeset online format.
A generation ago, man pages and Texinfo were developed as formats for multiple outputs — typeset outputs for paper and the `linked' outputs for online work.
Sad to say, even computer geeks tend to write for just one format. I have seen this often.
On a corporate level, many companies resist changing their business models. As the cost of reduplicating information drops, they seek more governmental policing. Like the old time dumping of toxic wastes, governmental policing costs them nothing.
For civilization, to police against advances in technology is to fail.
The better business solution is to adapt, as IBM is doing for example. Businesses can sell services rather than package them as products that depend on policing to keep their prices high.
Such companies could become more like you, who sell your services.
As I said, for legal textbooks and casebooks, the technical problems have been solved. We can and should improve the technical solutions, but the critical work has been done.
The legal problems have also been solved. Other legal questions exist and should be addressed; but for documentation, the work has been done.
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[1] The first syllable of “Texinfo” is pronounced like “speck”, not “hex”. This odd pronunciation is derived from, but is not the same as, the pronunciation of TeX. In the word TeX, the `X' is actually the Greek letter “chi” rather than the English letter “ex”. Pronounce TeX as if the `X' were the last sound in the name `Bach'; but pronounce Texinfo as if the `x' were a `k'. Spell “Texinfo” with a capital “T” and the other letters in lower case.
[2] Enforcing the GNU GPL,
Eben Moglen, 10 September 2001,
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html
[3] Personal communication