[sword-devel] Sword LICENSE

[SonWon]

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Troy A. Griffitts <scribe at crosswire.org>wrote:

> Re: Dual Ownership
>
> Yes, CrossWire as always had the policy of requiring ownership be also
> granted to CrossWire for any contributions which get added to our
> repository.  This has been discussed many times and should be posted
> conspicuously in multiple locations on our website (I hope it is still).
>  It doesn't mean the original author loses their ownership, but they must
> grant ownership rights also to CrossWire.  The reason has indeed been that
> Bible societies, translation organizations, and other ministries have at
> times asked to use our engine within a work which is not GPL and we
> consider their request and almost always grant permission.  I personally am
> not religious about the GPL.  My personal goal is to write free software to
> aid ministries to serve their people groups.  If they feel their ministry
> is served best by asking for donations or selling part of their work to
> fund future work, I may not always agree with them, but that is their
> choice.  I don't feel it's my place to dictate to them how their ministry
> should be run, at the risk that I won't aid their ministry.  If anyone
> would have submitted code or a patch which included a copyright notice by
> other than CrossWire Bible Society or by any other license than the GPL, it
> would not have been accepted.  The reason I didn't choose an MIT style
> license is to better encourage commercial vendors to contribute back to our
> code, if they ever find parts of it useful.  That hasn't worked so well :(
>  I hope no one feels they have been cheated.  We have always openly
> maintained this policy and the copyright notice is universal throughout our
> code base.  I also hope we all feel the same about still aiding ministries
> where it would be difficult for them to change their product licenses to
> GPL.
>
> Troy
>
> I think this is a good policy since it makes us accountable to God.
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