The set of programmes has been made at the Nicholas Copernicus Observatory and Planetarium in Brno (http://www.sci.muni.cz/obsbrno). It contains mostly work of members of the Amatérská prohlídka oblohy (Amateur Sky Survey [3]), whose professional member I am. The programmes solve a lot of various tasks I have encountered, astronomical and another ones.
All programmes and their parts are free software, and to ensure the
freedom further on, their use is regulated by the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version. If you do not have the
text of the license (it should accompany the programmes as
gpl.txt), you will find it at
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.
The same directory
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/)
gives also the reasons, why is such specification needed and what
free software in general is. GNU license demands, e.g., that
anyone, who gets some of the programmes in an executable form, would
obtain its original text or an information, where it is available.
The programmes can be best used by those people, who have access to the
Borland Turbo Pascal compiler, or who will download a very good Free
Pascal Compiler [4]. The last one works on many platforms
(under Linux as well). Source texts of all programmes are available
as a packed file pas_jh.zip at
http://astro.sci.muni.cz/pub/hollan/programmes.
The same address hosts also translated executable files for a PC-XT
with numeric coprocessor (as a package exe87_jh), for a PC
without it (exe_jh) and for Linux PC's. The disadvantage of
executable files is they cannot be adapted to your environment, which
can differ in directory structure, time zone, etc.
Some programmes need astronomical data, and these are available as
further packages (or archives, *.zip files). The packages are
packed by programme pkzip (or by programme zip, on
UNIX platforms). They can be ``unzipped'' by e.g.
pkunzip /d pas_jh.zip or by unzip pas_jh.zip.