[sword-devel] The OSIS Vision vs STEP

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Chris,	
	While I appreciate your comments, I have disregarded (and think others 
should as well) the doom pronouncements on OSIS sales and distribution.

	I had a conference call yesterday with the American Bible Society and 
they have assured me that they plan to sell and distribute OSIS 
documents exactly as I have stated in my previous email.  I am working 
with them to produce an OSIS document repository that will deliver OSIS 
texts in PDF, eBook, and other formats to end users.  They are working 
on solutions for digital rights management, and future OSIS 
specifications will likely included such.

	If you don't think this vision for OSIS is valid, tell it to the 150+ 
publishers, software vendors, and Bible Societies already signed up for 
OSIS training next month in Canada.

	-Troy.



Chris Little wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Don A. Elbourne Jr. wrote:
> 
> 
>>STEP was supposed to be the same thing, and it appears to have flopped. I
>>hope OSIS succeeds. As a format, it is better, but I am partial to XML. As
>>far as vision goes, I'm not sure what real world advantages it will have
>>over STEP, if any.
> 
> 
> It's never going to happen the way Troy hopes it will.  It's also never
> going to work like STEP did (thankfully).
> 
> OSIS is an XML standard.  It's plaintext.  It's completely unprotected 
> from copying and redistribution.
> 
> The only content owners who would consider distributing material to
> consumers in a format like this are the ones who don't care about
> restricting distribution, which is almost none of them.  And they're the
> ones who give us premission anyway, so this solves no problem.
> 
> Content owners might use STEP as an interchange format with other
> corporations (other content holders, software publishers, etc.), but not
> so that they can give out the whole plaintext document.  They'll do it so
> that they can easily & predictably produce protected content (printed 
> books, encrypted electronic texts, etc.).
> 
> IBS/Zondervan are never going to give out an OSIS edition of the NIV.
> 
> Relying on Bible societies to do their own sales is a nice way of shirking 
> all responsibility and ensuring that nothing will ever be accomplished, in 
> my opinion.  They have essentially no motivation when other platforms 
> already provide their translations.  It also hinders the users who have to 
> go to 3 different publishers and perform 3 different transactions just to 
> buy the three most popular translations, which you can do in one 
> transaction when using any other Bible program.
> 
> In my opinion, the most viable solution to the problem of getting 
> copyrighted texts into people's hands is to partner with someone who does 
> this already--a few of you know who I mean.
> 
> In short though... to answer your question:  STEP is a hack of RTF.  All 
> the content creation tools were proprietary and expensive.  OSIS is XML 
> and easy to create--by design.  Anyone can make an OSIS document, even me!  
> People like XML, it's chic, it's hip.  No one ever liked RTF.  Except MS.  
> Lot's of other reasons too.  It's open.  Well thought out, etc.  Yeah.
> 
> --Chris
>