[sword-devel] Diaspora.exe and palm bible+

[Chris Little]

Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> I am a bit confused by a message I saw on the forum regarding Diaspora. 
> 
> https://www.crosswire.org/forums/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=498
> 
> Chris states that diaspora.exe is withdrawn and should not get distributed as this would be a violation of Crosswire's copyrights. The copy  I have is GPL licensed, tough in absence of source that is not worth much. If there is no source about, distribution would indeed be in violation of the GPL.

Diaspora was written at a time before we needed to worry much about 
protecting 3rd party text copyrights. It was intended to permit export 
for a few basic purposes:
- output for use in Palm Bible Plus
- output for use in OLB
- output to standard XML format (ThML, OSIS)

We now strongly discourage using Sword modules as a basis for modules 
for other software. We want to encourage people to use the Sword API 
itself if they want access to our content collection.

Beyond that, there are simple technical reasons for withdrawing support 
of Diaspora--namely, I don't have the time or desire to continue 
development, which means its stuck on a very old version of Sword and 
doesn't necessarily work with new modules.

As to the license/copyright, no 3rd parties have ever distributed source 
code, so they're clearly in violation of the license, and thus the 
copyright.

> Diaspora is though - apart from various nefarious uses - also part of the approved way of creating Palm Bible+ modules.
> 
> http://palmbibleplus.sourceforge.net/createbible.htm
> 
> It appears to be associated (remotely) to CrossWire and is linked to from the front page.
> 
> Could I get some clarification regarding this piece of software? Is there a compelling legal reason to suppress it (apart from stupid abusers). Should we remove the link to Palm Bible+?

We've historically linked to a few projects over the years that provide 
services that we don't (and don't intend to). We link to and encourage 
use of Palm Bible Plus because we are unlikely to ever port Sword to Palm.

 > Is there a better way of getting new modules into palm Bible+ format?

Most modules include an identification of their source. To create 
content for Palm Bible Plus, developers can get it from those sources 
(and get permission independently, if necessary).

--Chris