[sword-devel] Important! Texts from Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, please help!

[Michael Paul Johnson]

At 11:53 1/25/2000 -0700, TimO wrote:
>Daniel Blake wrote:
> > 
> > The thought I have about this topic goes straight to the objective of the
> > SWORD project.  Even if you could make operating system dependant modules
...
>In the case of Bibelgesellschaft where we can use the texts for Linux/GNU
>but not for Windows, perhaps we can come to a workaround via a simple key. 
>I'm presuming here that the texts are encrypted(I don't know).  There could
>be a single key included with Sword/Linux which could unlock the text for
>Linux which is available for download or whatever; and a separate key for
>Windows included with their proprietary product.  This would avoid the
>problem of competing with a free front-end which is basically using their
>own product.

I like this idea. If you are going to deal with proprietary texts at all, then perhaps this method would be fairly painless. It could be a simple extension of the "keyring" concept of key management. In this method, when an encrypted text is encountered, the program tries all keys in the "keyring" file until one works. To know if a key works, you can have some constant known plain text (preferably at least as long as the key) at the beginning of the encrypted module. If that decrypts to the known value, then the key works. If none works, then the text is not displayed at all and (preferably) a pointer is given to the correct entity to purchase the key from. The default initial keyring can vary by platform, if necessary. This is obnoxious, of course, and not fool-proof with respect to the problem of copying the key to another platform, but it may just be enough to get permission from Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft to use their texts on at least some platforms.


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Michael Paul Johnson
http://ebible.org/mpj