[sword-devel] Locking of sword modules

[Glenn Reed]

Yeah, Ok I understand that the bible societies want to receive a fair and 
just wage for the work that I do.  And I understand that the bible societies 
have committments to other projects.  But what further committment (from 
them) does it take?

In fact, the way I see it, is that by allowing purchase of keys for locked 
modules they have everything to gain and nothing to lose and all this without 
any greater committment from them.

I tend to think the copying issue of text is meaningless seeing that people 
can easily copy whole programs of software without any distribution 
safeguards whatsoever.  That is someone could buy the New American Standard, 
say, from a lochman foundation authorised software reseller with bible 
program for reading their translation and then make copies for all their 
friends without there being any checks at all.  In fact the only way around 
this, for them, would be to adopt some kind of product activation key system 
like Microsoft Office XP, where you have to ring a toll free number or 
connect to the internet to register it.  In summary I am saying that copying 
bible texts from non-sword sources is much more likely than from us.

Perhaps the best way is to come up with products so that are so much better 
than the competition that we can no longer be ignored.  Though I would expect 
that this is most likely being achieved in many cases anyway.

A question I have regarding sapphire encryption.
Is the whole file encrypted like zipping a file with a password?  Or is the 
text encrypted inside the module?  (I mean leaving the module structure 
un-encrypted).  If the text is encrypted inside the module does this lead to 
two different sets of api's?  One for unlocked modules and one for locked?

Glenn.

On Tuesday 10 September 2002 07:58 am, you wrote:
> >Well, first, there are no plans to license as anything other than GPL.
> >Second, there has never been any suggestion that we go to any license that
> >is not open-source except by those who see this as a way of convincing
> >copyright holders that Sword is secure.
>
> I've wondered (since I'm a Windows programmer ) if it would be effecient to
> tokenize a biblical text and put it into a DLL along with methods for
> retreiving text and locking the module.  The DLL code could be proprietary
> thus assuring copyright holder secruity and Sword could remain GPL. ???
>
> Chuck