[jsword-devel] Re: JSword license

[Mike Kienenberger]

Chris Little <chrislit@crosswire.org> wrote:
> This describes the creation of a derivative work.  You've used a 
> copyrighted work to understand the format and derived a work-a-like from 
> that.  As a result, it must be GPL licensed.  You could remove the 
> compressed module code and just deal with the raw files, releasing the 
> result under Apache license or something else (you could even keep it 
> proprietary).

Can you provide me with a reference showing why knowing the format of the 
data makes code using the data a derived work?  There is no commonality 
between the c++ code used to convert an entire raw text file to a compressed 
format and java code used to look up a particular verse.

Please feel free to email me offline if this is not appropriate for the 
mailing list.