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

[Chris Little]

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> It is true that people can do that with any GPL program legally if they
> want to.

GPL doesn't govern how you use software once it's compiled & in the 
user's hands.

> 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.

This is a red herring. On the one hand, copyright violation is still 
illegal, regardless of how difficult or easy it is to perform.

On the other hand, there's nothing more or less secure about data in 
Sword's format than in others. Most Bible programs either explicitly 
allow data export, use some sort of interprocess communication (like a 
daemon), or have data formats so obvious that they might as well be open 
(if they aren't). And to my knowledge, they all allow some level of copy 
& paste.

No publisher has ever voiced any kind of concern on this basis.

> Then about the network protocol: it really seems that giving the human
> readable text over a net connection could destroy us.

I believe the original request was for a daemon to run on the same 
system as the client--not over a network.

--Chris