[sword-devel] Copyright and locked modules

[Troy A. Griffitts]

	Not to discourage anyone, just to restate the positions that have been 
stated many times before in private and public:

	CrossWire does not support ANY commercial (including 10% markup) 
selling of sword modules by any 3rd party.  There are a number of 
reasons for this, among only a few: a) it confuses the issue of who 
content creators need to deal with; b) what official relation this party 
has with CrossWire; c) clouds the image and purpose of CrossWire; and 
honestly d) it ticks me off that people want to make any money from the 
countless hours we've sacrificed over the years to bring this software 
to Bible Societies, other ministries, and our end users with no money 
involved.  This is the keynote of our ministry.

	If a publisher wishes to sell their own texts, we will support them as 
much as we can, just short of taking the money and delivering it to them.

	We would prefer to have copyright holders give their texts away for 
free, obviously, but feel they know their ministry better than us, and 
if they feel they need to charge, then that is between them and the Lord.

	CrossWire DOES support OSIS markup directly.  To say: we do our best 
and have every intention of supporting fully the OSIS specification and 
any OSIS encoded documents for use with our software.  As Chris has 
stated, it is technically by import into a normalized OSIS markup and 
compressed.

	I am convinced that if we had someone with the professionalism and time 
necessary to put into researching and contacting the proper individuals 
in the proper way, many copyright holders would be inclined to take your 
money, as they probably already have methods of electonic distribution 
and sales.

	And to conclude, this isn't an offical announcement, but Lockman has 
agree to sell the NASB for SWORD, as soon as we finish work on it, and 
they have been extremely surprised and grateful that we don't want 
royalties for 'ALLOWING them to distribute their text in our format'.  I 
think this example will be extremely conducive to convincing other 
organizations to do the same.

	-Troy A. Griffitts.

PS.  Someone please link to this in the wiki FAQs



Barry Drake wrote:

> Hi David ...........
> 
> On 8 Jan 2004 at 14:16, David's Mailing List and Spam Receiver wrote:
> 
>>Basically my idea would be to distribute keys or whatever for OSIS modules at
>>near cost to me. 
> 
> 
> I think I'm right in saying that Sword will never directly support OSIS 
> modules - am I right in this Chris?
> 
> 
>>Now my only question is this, would there be a problem with my contributing
>>code to the project if I do this? I'd like to eventually contribute some good
>>map and chart code to the project and am working on some basic ideas for that.
> 
> 
> Personally, I see no problem at all with any of your suggestions.  There 
> would be no conflict of interests, and anyone who wanted to purchase a 
> Sword module which is copyrighted would be passed on to you.  Really 
> though, Troy ought to give an opinion here.
> 
> God bless,
> Barry
> 
> -- From Barry Drake (The Revd) minister of the Netherfield United 
> Reformed church, Nottingham see http://www.jesusinnetherfield.org.uk 
> for our church homepages).
> 
> Replies - b.drake@ntlworld.com
> 
> 
>  
> 
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