Questions asked by Brave GNU World 
----------------------------------

 * What is it?

   GNU Typist is a typing tutor. You can learn correct typing with it
   and improve your skills by practicing its exercises on a regular
   basis. It uses lessons "scripts" and can be easily extended.

 * Who would use it?

   - Individuals who want to improve their typing skills.

   - Educational institutions for their typing course exercises.

 * Why would they use it instead of similar projects?

   This is mainly thanks to the GNU General Public license under which
   is it released. I won't discuss all the interests of Free Software,
   but here are the major ones I see for this tool...

   - For individuals: 

     o The program is freely available, and is already
       installed in some GNU systems (such as Debian GNU / Linux)

     o The program is been made by people using it, or according to the
       needs expressed by users. 

     o They can participate in improving the tool quality, by reporting bugs
       and even propose improvements to the source code.

   - For educational institutions, in addition to the above reasons:

     o They can rely on the availability of this software, as nobody
       can restrict their freedom to use it for their educational
       programs.
       
       Freeware typing programs are available at the moment, but their
       owners can discontinue their distribution or their support
       without any notice. You can't base your educational programs on
       such software.

       More generally, with proprietary software, you have no way to
       make sure that the software satisfies your needs. You depend
       one somebody else's good will.

       Using Free Software gives you freedom to modify the programs
       according to your needs, or pay someone to do that. 

     o Teachers will be able to rely on the course library delivered
       with the software. As the lesson file format is simple, they
       can easily write their own lessons (possibly from exercises
       they have already written)

       This is a way of encouraging schools to share their teaching
       materials and support education in developing countries, who
       may neither have enough teachers nor funds to acquire
       proprietary courses.

 * (Programming) language used in this project?

   - C language. Compliant with GNU coding standards.

 * Special features/strengths?

   - Available in several versions of Unix (including GNU/Linux) and
     Windows.

   - It's extensible... lessons for other keyboards and languages can
     be easily added.

 * Who is working on it?

   o Tim Marston, development, project maintainer
   o Felix Natter, development, German translation, tools

   ...and lots of other contributors and previous project members who
   are listed in the `ChangeLog' and `THANKS' files.

 * History of the project?

   - See the manual (http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/doc/) for the
     complete history of this project. It started on VAX/VMS!

 * Plans for the close and distant future?

   - See the http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gtypist.git/tree/TODO.
     It is the most up-to-date version of the TODO file in the project
     sources.

 * Do you need help? If so: of what kind?

   Yes, we need help!

   - For supporting other languages in the interface.

   - For coding and testing, or getting patches for today's code.

   - For finding people (teachers, for example), who would write new
     lessons.

   - For finding old typing lessons in libraries, which copyrights
     have expired (how long does it take for a copyright on a written
     document to expire?). Once we have written lesson files in the
     GNU Typist format from these old documents, I guess there is no
     problem to copyleft these new files under the GPL.

 * Interesting/fun stories that might juice up the story?

   - Nothing yet.

 * Website/FTP addresses?

   - All the online resources are documented at

     http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/

 * License?!

   - The GNU General Public License, for the software and all the
     files included in its source tarball. It is copyrighted directly
     by the Free Software Foundation.

   - All the contributions to be added to the source tarball
     (typically lesson files) must thus be released with the same
     license and copyright.
   
 * Standard documents to read in this context?

   - Nothing yet.

 * Anything you would like to see mentioned?

   - Nothing yet.

 * Answer to a question I forgot?
 
   - Who shall I send my comments to?

     Your comments are all welcome! Please, send them to
     bug-gtypist@gnu.org
