[sword-devel] Project “Free Scriptures” started

Mon Feb 24 02:35:14 MST 2014

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Hi!

I must say that although I do not agree with all the criticism of the
Sword project I do agree with some of it, and I actually hope that a
bit of healthy competition would help both parties.

IMHO this again highlights some of the problems of the Sword project
which have also been discussed previously: e.g. Sword module formats
are not well documented and formalized (making them "unreadable"). In
addition, although Sword is GPL, there are many obstacles for
outsiders to actually start contributing to the project, hence I
somewhat understand why Sword might be perceived as not Free software.
The same goes for the distribution (and modification) of modules.

It seems to me that the "Free Scriptures" project is an effort to
develop a more open project with more freely distributable and
modifiable modules. Seems like a good idea to me.

Blessings,
Jaak

PS: Personally I'd consider a BSD/MIT license for the software.

On 22.02.2014 22:02, Stephan Kreutzer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I just want to announce that the project “Free Scriptures” (see 
> http://www.free-scriptures.org) was started some time ago, which
> has the goal of developing freely licensed software for processing
> bible texts into various output formats. It will also serve as
> platform for “language teams” who work on the digitalization,
> proofreading and reproduction of bible texts of their native
> language. This way, we hope to establish a repository of public
> domain and freely licensed bible texts, which are carefully checked
> and ready for processing. At the same time, the language teams will
> be responsible for preparing and publishing the bible texts
> according to the context of their own language. The international
> “Free Scriptures” platform is intended to help the
> language-specific “branches” of the project. As we promote free 
> software philosophy and practices in the field of bible software,
> we’re therefore limited to bible translations which are either in
> the public domain or which are freely licensed initially. Not only
> are our software tools freely licensed, they’re also required to be
> usable on freely licensed computer software environments. We refuse
> to use or integrate non-free, restrictive, proprietary software,
> because digital freedom matters for each and every user, especially
> if it comes to a highly important topic like the text of the bible.
> Please note that price isn’t an issue at all as we face artificial
> legal and technical restrictions – freely licensed bible software
> and bible texts can be used commercially and non-commercially at
> the same time.
> 
> Since the SWORD project doesn’t seem to be much concerned about
> digital freedom (no repository of OSIS sources, only unreadable
> SWORD modules) or the quality of bible texts (no checking,
> distribution of incorrect texts), I hope you at least don’t hinder
> our efforts, since you too can benefit from them. Probably you may
> even improve your approach to one which is more compatible with
> other free (bible) software. If you have some questions or
> suggestions, please feel free to contact us. We host a discussion
> board on our website, where guests have write access. At the 
> moment, there are several posts present in German language, which
> only stay there for the purpose of translation.
> 
> As a first task, we’re working on a tool for converting OSIS to
> Haggai XML. In the past, we’ve specified Haggai XML as our own
> bible text encoding format, which is based on Zefania XML. Since
> neither Zefania XML nor OSIS are well-designed XML formats for
> bible text encoding, Haggai XML was intended as an improvement
> suggestion for Zefania XML. Zefania XML will now get improved to
> Zefania XML 2014, hopefully by keeping it’s basic and primitive
> structure, which is ideal for the digitalization of old, printed
> bible texts. If Zefania XML 2014 gets released, we will consider to
> replace Haggai XML as main input format for our tools by it. As for
> now, we automatically generate PDF, EPUB2/3 and XHTML from Haggai
> XML input. In order to do the processing for the German “Offene
> Bibel” (“Open Bible” – the only freely-licensed modern bible
> translation in German language, which gets translated 
> collaboratively on Wiki software, providing OSIS output), we work
> on a simple, basic conversion from OSIS to Haggai XML, so that we
> can use all of our tools we’ve developed so far. Those tools will
> get migrated to “Free Scriptures” within the next time.
> 
> 
> Sincerely, Stephan Kreutzer
> 
> 
> PS: I can’t register to your forum, the registration form gives a
> 404.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing
> list: sword-devel at crosswire.org 
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