[sword-devel] Project "Free Scriptures" started

[Daniel Hughes]

Regardless of what you want, the fact is that it's already to late.
JSword, sharpsword, CrossConnect and who knows what else already use
your format.

You are the authoritative source for other projects weather you like
it or not. The sword modules you have are an invaluable resource for
other projects which go far beyond the usefulness of libsword itself.
This is evident by the mere existence of all these projects using
sword modules but not using libsword, (each of them have done it
because they can't use libsword)

Trying to hold onto this ideology is no longer productive. You have
produced something amazingly good and useful. Please help us all by
publishing the module format.

Sincerely,
Daniel Hughes

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 1:04 PM, Troy A. Griffitts <scribe at crosswire.org> wrote:
> 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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