Personally, I have an affinity for open-source material when the option to use such instead presents itself. For those of you that might not know what that is, "open-source" means free redistribution and access to an end product's design and implementation details (e.g. Wikipedia and Firefox). In other words, I'd rather have and make open-source content than to use material that is commercially available, and I'd like to contribute to such reservoirs of knowledge as well. This is where you might be able to help, estimata leganto.

I am looking for a online library of open-source content in which I can find books, poems, articles, or whatever to read and, after I am sufficiently proficient, to which I can contribute with some material of mine own. Do any of you have any suggestions for me? Thank you in advance, miaj amikoj.

I'd rather have and make open-source content than to use material that is commercially available

Just to be clear, the Open Source Definition explicitly promotes commercial involvement and commercial products under the approved licenses. In fact, a license cannot be open source if it forbids selling of the product. It was the motivation for creating the term "open source" in the first place as "Free Software", which also has nothing to do with money, was considered confusing. There are a number of reasons to avoid the term "open source" too though, some of which are expressed by the GNU project.

Anyway, "Free Cultural Works" or "Free Content" are more appropriate terms for non-software products with open-source-like licenses.

With regard to Free Cultural Works which are Esperanto related, I can't really help you beyond pointing you to Project Gutenburg (which you can't contribute to except perhaps to help them convert old books into ebooks) and Wikibooks.

Edit: And Wikipedia, of course.

Ninjay,

You might not be aware, but the technology dictionary Komputeko includes an index of source documents, including referencing the translation databases of several open source projects. Another feature I find extremely useful is that the dictionary notes variations in usage between sources.

Here is a list of open source projects cited on p. 8 of the Komputeko, under the heading Fontindikoj:

• OpenOffice.org
  
• KDE
  
• Drupalo
  
• Firefox
  
• Vikipedeo

I'm sure there are lots of other open source projects that include Esperanto localized resource files and documentation. It seems to be an increasingly popular thing to do in the open source movement.

If you're looking to collaborate on a project, second Teapot's advice and suggest expanding EO language editions of Wikimedia properties (Wikipedia/Wikisource/Wikibooks) and so-forth.

If you want to create your own collaborative work, I suggest starting a new wikibook, or perhaps using a free wiki hosting service and collaborating with friends under a "free cultural work" friendly license.

Teapot:

I'd rather have and make open-source content than to use material that is commercially available

With regard to Free Cultural Works which are Esperanto related, I can't really help you beyond pointing you to Project Gutenburg (which you can't contribute to except perhaps to help them convert old books into ebooks) and Wikibooks.

And there's also the ESPDIC (Esperanto-English Dictionary) which can be downloaded and has been incorporated into a number of applications.

http://www.denisowski.org/Esperanto/ESPDIC/espdic_...

ESPDIC is licensed under the Creative Commons agreement, meaning anyone can use it for any purpose (including commercial purposes) as long as the source is properly attributed.

When I started the CEDICT (Chinese-English dictionary - now over 100,000 entries) project, I quickly learned that it was futile to try preventing people from using the dictionary in unapproved ways (such as including it in commercial products). I eventually relinquished all copyrights on the project in an attempt to make it more useful to the "open source" community, and this is the reason for the very permissive license on ESPDIC.

In fact, there are at least TWO printed versions of ESPDIC out there and many other applications as well, and I encourage the Esperanto community to use the dictionary in this or any other way it sees fit.

Contributions to ESPDIC are very welcome -- I personally typed in the first 20,000 or so entries in the CEDICT project and the remaining 80,000 or so were all contributions. I would love to see something similar happen for ESPDIC (since at this point almost all of the 54,000 entries were hand-typed and hand-edited solely by myself)

Amike,

Paul

Humorously, I keep wanting to call "ESPDIC" EBCDIC. As in the character encoding. Lame, I know.

eojeff:Humorously, I keep wanting to call "ESPDIC" EBCDIC. As in the character encoding. Lame, I know.

I wonder if anyone ever tried to come up with a scheme for encoding accented Esperanto characters in EBCDIC. I remember some pretty ugly 7-bit ASCII mappings for Esperanto before Latin-3 and (soon after) Unicode support became widespread.

In my opinion Unicode was the single best thing that ever happened to the linguistics community.

Amike,

Paul

Thank you for clarifying the matter for me, Teapot, and thank each of you for the suggestions that you gave!