[sword-devel] No, not new! Re: a MacSword review

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

On Sat, 21 Apr 2007, Karl Kleinpaste wrote:
> I wonder what it would take to get the folks at bsreview.org to open
> their eyes just a little wider.

I can understand that for some people Linux does not exist or is not
interesting enough to be installed for testing purposes. Also "Open
Source" means "inferior to commercial" for some (as I read in some
review), but that I don't understand (unless our software really is
inferior).

Also I understand that "underlying technology" is not interesting for
most of the Bible software users or reviewers. They see the user
interface and features which can be accessed through that, period. And
it's not wrong. We care about the sword programming library, they don't,
and they don't have to. Every application has to stand on it's own. If
Linux is left out, we have only MacSword, BibleCS and JSword (and some
smaller?).

The Sword techology can only offer low-level features and modules. For
many end users high quality modules mean very much. It means "my
favourite translation". Getting support from commercial publishers is
the most urgent need of this project, and we know how difficult it is.
Wycliffe translations don't help millions of American people who want to
read NIV. Sad but true.

Also one sad thing about Sword is the BibleCS. It should be the flagship
of Sword. Now it's more like a prototype. Don't take me wrong, you know
that I have done much work with that (translating) and answered support
questions. But I really honestly think that it should be replaced
with something better, or improved greatly. I respect the work done by
Troy, Chris and others, but it has been quite clear that BibleCS is not
of top priority for them.  Apparently they would like to do other
things, and it's not right that they have to put their energy into
something which is not very interesting.  This is Open Source and we all
should love what we do, right?

Why we don't attract developers and community? BibleTime has even
www-pages translated to many languages but BibleCS has not got updates
for the user interface translations, except my Finnish translation (at
least that I know of). Closed source products have active forums,
BibleCS (sub)forum gets 4 message threads per year, of which one was
"Is Sword for Windows Dead?". What's the problem?

  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)