[sword-devel] Distributing modules with SWORD frontends

[Jonathan Marsden]

Ian Wagner wrote:

> Hey, I have been asked on several occasions if it would be possible for
> me to bundle a Bible or 2 with the App Store release of PocketSword. I
> am aware that this is not allowed for many modules since the license to
> distribute (or whatever they call it) was granted only to Crosswire. Are
> there any modules that would be legal to bundle with a frontend? I
> suspect this might be permissible for the KJV, but I would like to be sure.

As I understand it, the field in the .conf file that determines what
distribution rights exist for a given SWORD module is called
DistributionLicense.  So you can grab the module index file

  wget ftp://ftp.crosswire.org/pub/sword/raw/mods.d.tar.gz

It contains all the CrossWire *.conf files.  Then you can unpack that
archive file:

  tar zxf mods.d.tar.gz

and then search through the resulting set of .conf files, for all files
whose licence is either "Public Domain" or "General public license for
distribution for any purpose" (only the KJV has the second one):

  egrep -lr "^DistributionLicense=(Public Domain|General public license
for distribution for any purpose)$" mods.d

and you will get a list of all the modules that have those two
distribution licences.

The above are unix-style commands, each should be on one line.  Adjust
for MS Windows if necessary, or use Cygwin :)

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but it looks to me as
though you could probably bundle up to 137 of the 315 modules in the
main CrossWire repository.  Including the KJV.

Jonathan