Community Nets Software: Future Directions. By Michael Silvestrini Realtime Online Andrew Patrick was the moderator of this panel which also included David Trueman, Chebutco technical leader, Greg Searle, University of Guelph, and Ian Duncan, McGill University Computing Centre. Most, if not all, freenets use the freeport software. Why? The answer is simple: Freeport was the first and had all the tools to get an organization going. If Freeport was the first and has all the tools, why the need to switch then? There are actually many reasons: * with the introduction of new technologies in computer hardware and software, Freeport was rapidly becoming an old dog whose days are numbered. * Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland has announced no plans to update Freeport to make it take advantage of the new emerging technologies making it vulnerable and outdated. * Anyone who has had to administer a Freeport network knows of the many bugs the package contains and the limitations they impose on making this product a viable one for the future. Having recognized the weaknesses of Freeport, many institutions started developing new products that will take advantage of the widely used Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and part with the heavily text-influenced Freeport. Such efforts have resulted in establishing the World Wide Web (WWW) which was started by CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics). The WWW seeks to build a distributed hypermedia system. Then came Mosaic from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne (UIUC) and became the most popular browser of the WWW. As innovative as these new tools are, they stopped short of delivering the ultimate in software excellency due to many reasons. An already established network will have to rewrite the information it has in those new formats and that is no easy task. Furthermore, Mosaic will only work from an internet-connected network or from a dial-up connection to an internet service provider. The latter method will require a provider that offers Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) or Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) connections. To access the WWW, users run a browser program (such as Mosaic). The browser reads documents, and can fetch documents from other sources. Information providers set up hypermedia servers from which browsers can get documents. The documents that the browsers display are hypertext documents. Hypertext is text with pointers to other documents. The browsers let you deal with the pointers without having to know where the information is coming from -- select the pointer, and you are presented with the text or document that is pointed to. The browsers can, in addition, access files by File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the Internet news protocol), gopher and an ever-increasing range of other methods. On top of these, if the server has search capabilities, the browsers will permit searches of documents and databases. Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext -- it is any medium with pointers to other media. This means that browsers might not display a text file, but might display images or sound or animations. What's the big deal? Many people ask, "What is the difference between WWW and gopher or anonymous FTP?" The difference is that WWW will incorporate graphics, formatting, accents, sound and full-motion video into one very user-friendly, point-and-click format. Gopher navigates for users, just like WWW does, but it is essentially a plain menuing system. The University of Guelph is using a different system called Remote Imaging Protocol (RIP) that is essentially aiming at the same goals the WWW first aimed at: making the journey on the internet easier and more fun. (All the above information was not presented at the panel discussion but is included here to assist those who did not understand what what the WWW or Mosaic is, providing a geneal overview of what’s in place in the software market for accessing the internet in the most enjoyable way.) The speakers talked about what they are doing to make their systems as user-friendly as possible and while David Trueman talked about Halifax Freenet using the WWW, he indicated nothing about a vision for the future. He only talked about taking what'’s in the market and uinge itin the best possible way he could. Same message from Greg Searle: get a software in the market and use it. Only Ian Duncan sounded to me more like the person interested in having a say in what the next generation of software should be. -- Realtime Online - Professional Conference Reporting Team Rosaleen Dickson, Ottawa ac174@freenet.carleton.ca. Pierre Bourque, Michel Careau, Shady Kanfi, Charles King, Andrea Kujala, Jules Lafrance, Bruce MacDonald, Robt Rattey, Natalie Roth, Michael Silvestrini, Stephen Toy.