[sword-devel] Project "Free Scriptures" started

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Historically, CrossWire has always maintained that our data formats are 
volatile.  We optimize them, add new features to them, basically change 
them if we feel they need changing.  In reality one could say that they 
haven't changed much in the past few years, but this is only cursorily 
true.  The internal markup forms we process in the data format has 
changed significantly and continues to change.  We don't encourage 
projects to use our data formats directly because of this and the fact 
that we don't want to be used as an authoritative document repository 
(see previous email).

Summary: we don't encourage other projects to use our data sources for 
their own projects; we encourage them to use our API.  Our data formats 
and internal markup change and we don't wish to maintain them as a 
standard (primarily because we don't want to be the authoritative data 
source for a work for other projects).




On 02/24/2014 01:30 PM, Daniel Hughes wrote:
> I wonder if the fact that the sword module format is undocumented and
> not published contributes to this perception. There are at least 4
> different projects that I know of which implement sword module
> support. And they have either had to look at the sword code and thus
> accept GPL2 (no plus) licencing for there project or reverse engineer
> sword modules from the ground up.
>
> I can see how this would be perceived as closed behavior rather than
> free and open. Publish your module format as a free and open standard
> and you will probably avoid this kind of reaction to the sword
> project.
>
> God bless,
> Daniel Hughes
>
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 10:46 PM, John Zaitseff <J.Zaitseff at zap.org.au> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Jaak Ristioja wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>> One of the freedoms of the GNU General Public License is that anyone
>> is able to take and fork the code.  By all means, go ahead and do
>> so!
>>
>> The fact that no one seems to have done so (at least, as far as I
>> can see, successfully) shows that it is not all that easy to do:
>> apart from the actual coding, you have to convince other developers
>> and distributors to use YOUR fork, not the original project...
>>
>> That said, other projects have been forked, sometimes with the
>> original essentially dying off (eg, XFree86), other times with both
>> forks going strong (OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice spring to mind).
>>
>> Yours truly,
>>
>> John Zaitseff
>>
>> --
>> John Zaitseff                    ,--_|\    The ZAP Group
>> Phone:  +61 2 9643 7737         /      \   Sydney, Australia
>> E-mail: J.Zaitseff at zap.org.au   \_,--._*   http://www.zap.org.au/
>>                                        v
>>
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