[sword-devel] Web Interface

[Chris Little]

On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Derek Neighbors wrote:

> Perhaps, I didnt put in good terms.  The more you deviate from the Free
> Software user base the less help you get.  The less help you get the more
> your product suffers.  Let's say for example I pick a license that is
> 'incompatable' with the GNU GPL for a free software product.  In essence,
> I am locking out tens of thousands of packages and their code from being
> reused within my application before I write a single line of code.  This
> means I am at the disadvantage of writing everything myself.  In the same
> way choosing a tool that is not widely accepted in the Free Software
> community means doing a lot of work yourself.  Java while it has some free
> implementations is not widely accepted because of the licensing of Java
> itself.

I think this has been mentioned a few times before, but "Free Software"  
isn't really part of CrossWire's goal.  Our use of GPL as a license is
mostly the result of history and not having anything identifiably better.  
The politics of Free Software are irrelevent to our mission and GPL is at
times at odds with it.  The only three advantages that GPL has ever
afforded The Sword Project are: brand-name recognition of a politically
correct license, ability to be included in Debian, and Regexp code that
came from GNU.

We already DO have to do nearly everything ourselves and what we don't we 
can usually find under a considerably freer license like BSD.

In any case, what we're talking about here is a Sword front-end and Sword 
does pretty well everything that it needs to do itself--increasingly so as 
we (ie Troy) work to dump stuff like STL.

> I own a hosting company and have full control of my servers, but no way I
> would consider installing stuff like Tomcat, because of the licensing of
> Java.

Most people don't care about licensing politics.

> It seems you disregard studies in this area and believe that a 'few'
> mega hosts would better serve the people than lots of distributed hosts?

I do.  I'll take the stability and constancy of a few well maintained 
hosts over masses of ineptly maintained sites that come and go on a 
monthly basis and display varying levels of quality.  We don't need a 
hundred dead links to Sword web front-ends hosted at ~username accounts.

--Chris