[sword-devel] Bible Software Review

[jonathon]

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:14 PM, Chris Little wrote:

>> I would have thought that e-Sword has more modules than we do.
> We have 279 public + 50 beta = 329 modules on crosswire.org (some overlap between the two, but it's minimal). I would estimate we will have about 60 more within 2 months--some of it actually useful.

> e-Sword offers 146 free native downloads + 6 STEP + 23 for purchase = 175 total available.

I didn't count the number of resources.  I simply went by my memory of
what I had installed for both programs from official resources.  I
knew that the number of official, and semi-official resources for
e-Sword had dropped, but I didn't realize it had gone down by that
much.

> I would guess the other Jonathan's "e-Sword has thousands more than The SWORD Project" anticipates the user's willingness to break the law

The thousands does include pirated material.  :(
My current guesstimate is that 50% of the resources for e-Sword that
are available from esnips.com are being distributed in violation of
either their license, or copyright.

That said, there are roughly 1,500 e-Sword user created resources that
are not copyright violations.

> by using the various programs for e-Sword that use scraping of  BibleGateway, Gospelcom, etc.

The ability to scrape websites was removed from BeST in October 2007.
 Maintenance of BIT ended two or three years ago.  The era of e-Sword
utilities scraping websites lasted almost five years.

>Aside from those, e-Sword does have a certain amount of nice ready-made user-created content available that I'd love to make available, but I either know or suspect that it is not legal to distribute (by us or them).

At http://www.esnips.com/web/eSwordFAQs/ I have a set of PDFs with a
prefix of "caem".
This lists all of the e-Sword resources that are/were available when
the document was updated. I'm slowly updating those documents to
include copyright status.

###

If anybody has any suggestions on how to reduce the number of e-Sword
resources that are distributed in violation of copyright, or other
Intellectual Property laws and licenses, I'd like to hear them.

As the barrier for creating resources drops, so the incidence of
distributing resources in violation of IP law increases.   :(

xan

jonathon