[sword-devel] Websites

[Chris Little]

Some corrections, small & large...

On 4/9/2012 7:01 AM, Mike Hart wrote:
> ... (and formerly some palm
> apps)

CrossWire has never been involved in any palm apps. We link to a couple 
of Palm apps precisely because we don't have a Sword offering for Palm. 
(By Palm apps, I mean and I take you to mean PalmOS. BibleZ HD for WebOS 
does use The SWORD Project).

> I surmise that the statement ¨modules are part of the Sword Project¨ is
> all about pieces of paper with signatures on them by rights holders of
> texts (or similar papers affirming no IP is infringed for public domain
> texts.) That is, the rights requested and received to date have been
> about sword project and not Crosswire. I see this as a very limiting
> activity. Crosswire is so much bigger than the original windows program
> now, and to say that the modules are only sword project compatible but
> you ´may´ get them to work with this other program.....

David Haslam covered the difference between CrossWire-distributed 
licensing and Sword-format licensing, both of which are options we offer 
to rights holders. But that has very literally nothing to do with what I 
said or David's comment to which I was responding.

David's proposal was that http://crosswire.org/sword/modules/ be moved 
to http://crosswire.org/modules/. This address has Sword modules, so it 
should be under the Sword banner. It doesn't have Go Bible content. It 
doesn't in any way pertain specifically to The SWORD Project for 
Windows. Sword modules work in programs based on The SWORD Project, we 
make no statements that they 'may' work in other software, except 
perhaps that they 'may' work in JSword-based software since it is 
usually slightly lagging relative to The SWORD Project (the C library).

Sword modules don't work in Go Bible. They don't work in Flashcards. And 
every other CrossWire project I can think of falls under the umbrella of 
The SWORD Project. Accordingly, we shouldn't move the Sword modules 
address to the CrossWire page, since they aren't CrossWire modules 
generically, they're Sword modules specifically.

> Rights contracts could easily and should be negotiated under the
> umbrella of Crosswire and not just Sword, because it is a far bigger
> umbrella. For example, it would be a wonderful thing to see some
> Crosswire texts come out in kindle format. Yes a Kindle Fire can display
> Sword modules fine now, but the Kindle Keyboard is a perfectly capable
> bible reader but remains untouched by the sword project. also missed by
> the sword project is the e-ink nook, and Kobo Readers. You can get some
> form of bible reader onto each of these, but there are opportunities
> with each to make the experience better. Given the developer support of
> these devices (lawyers waiting to CND you), I don´t think that there
> will be any early opportunities to do this under the sword umbrella,
> unless sword makes an OSIS2EPUB script available. However, if even SOME
> modules could be separated from the sword project and released in
> alternate forms, the number of compatible devices suddenly doubles, the
> cost is cut by 80%, and battery life is extended by 20-40times. Consider
> a missionary in Tibet. A village has a solar panel that just about keeps
> up with the 30 lightbulbs in town. Would they want an e-ink tablet, that
> would take 1 light bulb left off 1 day every 3 weeks to charge, or a
> ipad that would take all the lightbulbs in town, all the time?
>
> There are still many oportunities to distribute scripture that are being
> missed because some pieces of paper are thought to be carved in stone.
>
> Please, think again about keeping modules locked up in sword format only.

TEI to LaTeX/PDF and EPUB (and accordingly MOBI, via Calibre) is trivial 
to do. Last semester I produced most of my course's readings in PDF, 
EPUB, & MOBI, from TEI P5 master documents so that students could use 
the reader of their choice. OSIS is /mostly/ just TEI, so you could 
either adjust the standard TEI XSLTs to take OSIS instead or convert the 
OSIS to TEI and use the stock TEI XSLTs themselves.

Most of your argument is against straw men, though. Absolutely no one 
has suggested that we ignore ebook formats, ebook readers, or seeking 
rights that allow us to distribute on the full gamut of our supported 
distribution platforms.

--Chris