[sword-devel] John Gill

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Bob,

	Thank you for sharing your heart.  It's nice to hear from you.  I would
love for us to collaborate more on efforts.  I can appreciate the
comments regarding limited time to spend on the project for the need to
maintain a paying job.

	Some things to think about:

	o	Have you considered your company taking on the role of an 'electronic
publisher'?  I would love to let our users purchase copyrighted texts
from you.  I understand the copyright holders' positions and know that
most of our users will always be willing to pay for an 'NIV', 'NASB', or
'NKJV'.  We neither have the facilities, nor the desire to maintain a
royalty license shop.

	o	Considering the above, and considering that you offer your 'software'
free today, have you considered allowing us to include support for LLS
modules?  Or even open-sourcing your software (since you give binaries
away anyway).  I'm sure we'd have many people porting your code to linux
and creating apache plugins and such.  It might open up a whole new
venue for your company.

	o	We've always said that we plan to LGPL our API eventually.  It
remains GPL to keep it free and to force any effort of collaboration by
a commercial company to be contributed back into the opensource arena. 
This does not prevent you from selling it, or from including it on a CD
that you sell, that otherwise is not GPL-- only that the software itself
remain GPL.  I would consider changing the copyright to LGPL if STEP and
LLS support were already included.  These are the two main competing
commercial entities, in my eyes, and there wouldn't be much of a need to
keep it GPL.  I know this is ambitious of me, but collaboration on a
common engine would only have benefits-- from my limited view of your
situation.


	Anyway, thank you again for your heart.  I do believe that we have
different means to a common intent-- to glorify our mutual Lord.

	God's blessings in your efforts, even if you did work for Microsoft,
		-Troy.