[sword-devel] Copyright and locked modules

[David's Mailing List and Spam Receiver]

On Friday 09 January 2004 01:39 am, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> 	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.

Well I would just like to clarify for the record that I'm not interested in 
making money. I re-ran some numbers and a $2 US markup ends up with me having 
$1.66 profit for me per unit based on the percentages in my original post. 
Which is far too much since money isn't the point of this exercise. And I 
have on problem selling at a loss on a case by case basis provided I can do 
so without going personally bankrupt. Like I said this isn't about making 
money, if fact I was rather uncomfortable with the idea at first. I 
personally dislike profit-mongering and commercialism. And I dislike the fact 
that I've aquired some of that in planning this. And originally I have always 
planned on doing this non-profit, however when this idea was presented to me 
again the other night it seemed that it was a good way to make a very very 
small contribution to my cost of living which in the area that I live in is 
rather low as it is.

Now as to the second point, I wouldn't be doing this with sword modules 
directly anyway but rather OSIS texts. Like I said in my first post, I don't 
believe that anybody should be locked down into a particular software 
vendor's product be it ours or VerseMonger just because that's what software 
they have a paid license for. If the modules are free(lunch) then I've got no 
problem with that, but if people must buy the module they at least ought to 
get to chose what software they use it with.

And I'm glad to hear about the NASB, it's not a translation I use and probably 
won't buy it for that reason. But at least it is a start.

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