[sword-devel] Larry Pierce of OLB

[Chris Little]

I spoke with Larry Pierce, the programmer of Online Bible for Windows this
morning.  He seems like a very nice fellow.  He is interested in
corresponding with someone who knows a bit more about Linux programming than
I do, possibly with some background in Delphi.  Would anyone like to
volunteer before I beg Troy? :)

He's looking to do a Linux version of OLB, but he's having trouble even
getting Linux installed.  And he's wondering about how some Delpi stuff will
translate to Kylix (which none of you may have, but at least you may know
better than I, who have never used Delphi).

I mentioned the possibility of his using Sword as the basis for OLB or our
adding native OLB support to Sword.  He wasn't totally averse to these, but
they would both be very long term projects and he mentioned that adding OLB
support to Sword would be difficult and cumbersome.  And from his
description of their file format, I can agree that it sounds difficult (but
certainly not impossible).  He suggested it would be much simpler to convert
his content to our format, which made me think he's not a completely evil
copyright holder. :)  They're going to start placing ALL their content
online, in addition to on CDs, once they get a new set of trunk lines.  So I
don't think he's got a horrible profit motive or anything and his only
interest in protecting copyright on his content is in protecting it from
commercial exploitation, with which I'm completely happy.  I know others
have different stories about Larry & copyrights, but I can't comment on
those since I don't know or understand all the facts.

--Chris