[jsword-devel] Re: [sword-devel] Sword license

[Mike Kienenberger]

I'm a games developer, and I'm interested in developing games incorporating 
bible verses.
I've looked around, and I found the Sword project.   However, since I do all 

of my work in Java and the Sword project was in C++, I figured I'd end up 
having to write my own classes to read the data sources, and began to do so, 

especially since what little I saw of the Sword source didn't appear to 
follow a well-designed (in my own opinion of course) object model.

However, I decided to do a search on the web and found Jsword.  It looks 
like you have a well-defined API accessing data in the drivers.

However, you're only releasing it under GPL, that means I can't use it since 

I use other APIs that are incompatible with GPL.

Is there any chance you could release the API under LGPL or Apache or BSD or 

some other more developer-friendly License?  The only comment in the mailing 

list archive I found on licensing seemed ambivalent.

Thanks,

-Mike


Joe Walker <joe@eireneh.com> wrote:
> >>If I read the Sword/JSword source code and from that 
design/information 
> >>write (port would be accurate?) classes, methods, etc. in Squeak 
to 
> >>process Sword Modules would I be obligated to also use the GPL?
>
> >If you write your own classes in Squeak to read Sword modules, you're 
not
> >incorporating Sword GPL code into your work.  If you read our code to 
see
> >how we do it and then write your own code to perform the same 
functions, 
> >you're not violating our copyright.
>
> [...]
> 
> HOWEVER in a way that is probably irrelevant because if you read any of 
> the JSword code that I wrote then I'm totally happy for you to write a 
> non-GPL, open source program based on it, and I'll copy this message to 
> jsword-devel to see what Mark thinks - Mark's opinion here is more 
> important than mine because he wrote more of the Java version of the 
> Sword drivers than me.