[sword-devel] e-Sword collaboration & other copyright matters

[Jonathan Hughes]

Dear Everyone,

    Here are my initial thoughts about collaborating with Rick and e-sword:

    -I am not sure if legally this would fly, I think that the copyright
holders would have to grant each organization individually the right to
distribute their work. I will do more research on this but that is what I
think will have to happen.
    -I think you may be right Chris it would be harder to get publishers to
grant us permission if it looks like they are giving away too much, also
some of our leverage as being a free, non-commercial and OPEN SOURCE
software package would be taken away. I know Rick's software is also free
but I guess it just does not have the same effect.

    IMHO we should leave the dealings with publishers to each of the
individual organizations, however, a good show of strength and unity would
be, if we run into huge problems with some of the copyright holders, we
could as a free software community send letters of support for each other or
together to show the copyright holders we are serious and will stand up
together. Also we can collaborate with ways of contacting copyright holders,
sharing information about each copyright holder and generally support each
other with the free flow of information between the two projects.  Do my
arguments make sense? I will do whatever everyone else wants to do, if most
people think it will be good if we collaborate with Rick then I will extend
that to him. What are other peoples thoughts?

-Jonathan
jhughes@crosswire.org
P.S. What were Rick's reason to not join forces with us in way of developing
a Windows frontend and using the Sword API?