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Udanax.comTM |
Opening Monday August 23, 1999
Xanadu Secrets Become Udanax Open-Source
The long history of the Xanadu® vision of hypertext has inspired many individual hypertext efforts. Some, such as Lotus Notes or the Web, were built by others based on aspects of our vision. Others were created directly by one of the Xanadu development groups -- groups working with Ted Nelson and building on his work in order to realize his vision of hypertext, as well as other goals inspired by this vision. Primary among such software are two systems developed by Udanax.com, back when it was known as "XOC" or "Xanadu Operating Company". These two systems are now known as Udanax Green and Udanax Gold.
The intellectual property rights to these two systems are held by Udanax.com, which brought them both to their current state. Based on the intellectual-property climate of the world at the time the work began -- long before the virtues of Open Source were widely appreciated -- keeping this work under trade secret seemed both standard and prudent. Today the world is very different. In celebration of the success and vast human benefit of the Open Source movement, we are proud at last to be able to present to the world the technical ideas and methods on which we worked so hard for so long.
Xanadu® Technologies -- An Introduction is the joint disclosure by Udanax.com & Project Xanadu, on Monday August 23rd, 1999 at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, inaugurating our new celebration of openness.
The License
There are a great variety of open-source licenses, but the X11 license is clearly the least restrictive of these. Accordingly, for The Udanax Open-Source License, we have taken the X11 license and filled in the blanks for the appropriate Udanax software. See our license page for details.
Philosophy and Motivation
The following documents all explain well why we built the Udanax systems, and what we hoped to accomplish.
The Network of Knowledge chapter of Eric Drexler's 1986 Engines of Creation, and Eric's 1987 paper Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge.
The Philosophy & Motivation chapter of our 1988 Green FeBe Manual.
Marc Stiegler's 1989 Unix Review article Hypertext Publishing.
Mark Miller's 1992? The Open Society and it Media (content forthcoming).
Ted Nelson's 1999 CACM article Xanalogical Media.
