CopyRight, CopyLeft, almost Public Domain, etc. [ l-o-o-ong ]

I'm considering a project for which I do not consider traditional
copyright, GPL ( of any form I've seen ), or public domain to be an
acceptable solution. As I have problems verbalizing what I do want, I
will describe the project aims and then list why each of the above
approaches to copyright fails.

BACKGROUND:
I have a visually impaired adult friend able to read ~20 pt. type.
He likes to read.
He is a newbie computer user with limited learning skills due to
repetitive strokes and other medical problems.
Aids for the visually impaired (or blind) exist suffering from two
pervasive problems:
   1. VERY expensive and due to their disability many are on
restricted incomes.
   2. they attempt to be ALL things to ALL people -- a lost cause by
definition.
"Project Gutenberg" [ http://promo.net/pg/history.html ] exists to
provide a computer readable repository of literature in the public
domain.

RELEVANT SIDE ISSUEs:
I] Enduring perennial questions include:
      1. How to promote FORTH [ I'll never use term "killer app" on
clf again ;} ]
      2. How can FORTH newbie learn both FORTH and good programming
techniques?
II] I am of the persuasion that one learns by solving "real"
problems.
I have been working on a program to provide a restricted subset of the
capabilities of BRAVO.EXE &/or POWERPNT.EXE. [ For my problem they are
simultaneously "over endowed" and lacking in needed capabilities.
Working on this 'problem' has instructed me much on the benefits of
factoring .] This has resulted in some routines that should be useful
in displaying an arbitrary length text file in a fixed monitor width
in an arbitrary font size.

PREFERRED FORM OF SOLUTION:
I] Input from a wide variety of sources as to BOTH problem
definition and actual code.

This introduces my problem with copyright etc.
1. Traditional "copyright" is to restrictive any way you look at it
for a problem to which many DONATE effort.
2. "Public domain" allows anyone to appropriate WITHOUT ATTRIBUTION
underlying work of others.
3. GPL [ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ] seems to me to deny
ANY intellectual property rights to any expansion of a GPL'd work.
4. I would prefer something that might be termed an _Ambidextrous
Publication License_. The obvious abbreviation is already covered by a
copyright ;}! It would require the disclosure of the underlying code
and appropriate credits to the original author. The code added could
be as proprietary as desired.

II] A record of the evolution of the solution. It should illustrate
Top-down design, bottom-up programming and FACTOR FACTOR FACTOR ....
,]

I have some ideas on how this might be displayed on the web inspired
by FAQ-O-MATIC as illustrated by
http://www.forth.com/cgi-bin/swiftforth and David Williams' work. [I
have yet to determine all the restrictions on the WEB space that comes
with my logon account. I do know that whatever I do has to run on a
WindowsNT box and learning Perl etc. as an additional task is not in
the cards.]

As a practical matter, anything I put on these pages must run under
SwiftForth.
This still leaves open any sections dealing with how to approach this
( or any other ) programming task.
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Received on Fri Sep 06 2002 - 15:05:39 PDT