[sword-devel] daemon wanted, willing to pay reasonable fee

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2007, Chris Little wrote:

> Is your bible program project going to be GPL licensed?
>
> Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds a bit like an attempt
> at an end run of the GPL: using a (GPL) daemon to provide a socket
> interface to a non-GPL UI. We're really not very keen on the commercial
> exploitation of our years of work.

It is true that people can do that with any GPL program legally if they
want to. It would be even easier to write a command line program which
uses the sword engine and works almost like the engine. Our project is
especially vulnerable because the main function is transforming the
binary format into human readable text.

We have never discussed about that but this might be a legitimate reason
for text publishers to not use Open Source program. Once an encoded text
has been decoded with the Sword library there's nothing which could
prevent copying, moving or transforming even the whole text very easily.
The only reason why this is not the case is that nobody has yet
written such a program. We rely on status quo.

Then about the network protocol: it really seems that giving the human
readable text over a net connection could destroy us. Any Bible software
publisher could use a server and offer the modules to their frontends
via the internet. Therefore we don't want to offer the system the
original post asked for.

But could it be possible to move the binary module data over a network
connection so that the Sword library would act as a client, taking the
binary data from the server instead of a local file? That would be a
great way to give access to modules which a user doesn't want to
download and install permanently but wants to use every now and then or
evaluate.


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