[sword-devel] New/modern (copyrighted) bible translations

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Dear Tobias,

I would encourage you to choose a specific Bible you would like to see
offered.  Contact the copyright holder and explain what we do, explain
that we would love for them to sell their own Bible for our software,
that we don't want any royalties for them to do this, and that we will
do all the legwork to make their text work with our software.  Then do
the legwork to get their data, convert it to a point where they are
happy with the display in most of our major frontends, encipher it with
our locking mechanism, and give them the unlock key to sell.  We're
happy to distribute the enciphered module for them, they simply need to
sell the unlock key from their website.  This is our current policy with
copyright holders.  I haven't had any copyright holder say they are not
interested in this process.  There may not be a problem to solve, just
work to do.

There are many issues with another organization selling Bibles for
CrossWire.  They would need to negotiate with copyright holders as if
they represent CrossWire.  All user support is likely to come to us, no
matter what arrangement is made. e.g., if a purchased module doesn't
work well in XXX frontend, they are users are almost certain to complain
to us or the publisher-- neither of which are actually involved in the
quality of the module.  Some have done this in the past with good
motives and not so good motives (making a markup profit for simply
selling others' Bibles running on others' software).  It messes up our
promoted strategy: let the publisher sell their own material, e.g., we
approach the publisher and explain to them how they can sell their own
Bibles and other material with no middle man, and they say, "Hey, I
thought we already had a deal with CrossWire."  We have always
discouraged 3rd parties from trying to sell both our software and also
other's material for our software.

Anyway, the point is, there are a ton of emails about this over the past
20 years.  You can read them all on our mailing list archives.  It comes
up quite often.  I believe we have a good plan and an accepted software
solution to the problem.  The bottom line is that most of us are
working, as Michael Johnson says, primarily to bring the Word of God
freely to the lost who can't otherwise read and study the Word of God--
it is not most of our volunteers' goal to accomplish this.

Finally, I reluctantly bring up one very sore point of example:  Years
ago Lockman was happy to sell their NASB Bible for our software with the
process as described above.  They gave us their data, including a
Spanish translation and their Greek and Hebrew lexicons, which they
wanted us to convert.  Years went by with the conversion process
changing at least 3 hands.  We attained a reasonable conversion for the
Bible and permission to display this on our web study tool:

http://crosswire.org/study/passagestudy.jsp?mod=NASBnew

My requirements before release were:

1) a repeatable conversion script from Lockman provided data to SWORD module

2) successful conversion of all 4 data modules, as mentioned above

3) reasonable functionality on SWORDweb, BibleDesktop, Xiphos, and
Bibletime.

Each person taking up the conversion effort, including me at one point,
stalled somewhere along the line.  I still have my repeatable conversion
process for what you see at the link above (I am not sure if my effort
was mod=NASB or mod=NASBnew or one other attempt), which works
relatively well in SWORDweb.  I never worked on the lexica.  I think my
script should work on the Spanish Bible.  I don' t remember which
frontends reported that things were working.  At lease one person after
me took up the effort when I stalled (Greg maybe?), Chris and DM had a
go before me, I think.  This might be a bit of an exception, as the data
Lockman gave us had a super odd encoding, especially for the lexica.  My
personal feeling with regard to our failure as a team is that, to my
knowledge, no one taking up the task reused the code from those who had
gone before.  My conversion would have been make + sed + C++, I would
guess DM would have used Java, Chris: perl, Greg... ???  Anyway, it
wasn't an issue with the publisher.  They were happy to sell their text
for our software.  They didn't even mind the single unlock key mechanism
for all users, before we added the ability to generate unique keys for
each user.

Hope this explains a bit and doesn't open old wounds too widely,

Troy


On 3/12/19 4:51 PM, Michael Johnson wrote:
> On 3/10/19 7:56 PM, Tobias Klein wrote:
>> On 10.03.19 21:50, Michael Johnson wrote:
>>> I am well aware that this does not address the preference majority language speakers may have for certain modern copyrighted proprietary Bible translations. The best solution for access to those is to figure out a way to pay for those. This is not unreasonable. One of my few contributions to the Sword Project code was the encryption code used for locked modules for sale. However, the current model for selling modules excludes the Crosswire Bible Society, which actually doesn't handle money. I could through
>>> eBible.org, but I would need help with that.
>> Thanks for the clarification regarding DBL, Michael - that is very helpful! Do you know of any projects that sell non-free translations for the purpose of using them in an open source product?
> Those exist, but are rare. In general, proprietary Bible translation copyright owners are wary of anything open source. I can think of a couple of examples off of the top of my head: the NASB on https://eBible.org/study/, the NIV and NASB on https://InScript.org. These are open source software (InScript, AKA BrowserBible) hosting some commercial Bible translations. In the case of the NIV, some money changes hands, but not from the end user.
>
> There is some software that is given away at no cost to the end user, but which is not open source, that has had greater success, like YouVersion. YouVersion, however, does cost a great deal of money, and there are some back room deals I don't know the details of to get some of the translations on there. Much of it is bartering translation use for customer contact information and advertising value. This is a reasonable approach for a segment of the Bible study app "market". It just happens to not fall
> within the scope of what I do with eBible.org and CrossWire, which is all about free, unencumbered access to the Word of God in as many languages as we can provide, with special attention to those in creative access areas and those who may have Internet access, but no credit cards.
>
>> I have only seen non-free translations in commercial bible software so far.
>>
>> So, if I understood you correctly, the availability of specific non-free bible translations for use in an open source product would still depend on individual negotiation efforts with the respective bible societies?
> YES.
>
>
>> If I and/or others would want to pursue that route - do you have any other recommendations, specifically regarding the negotiation process?
> Use godly wisdom. I'm too tired of the rejection to do much more of that. I have had some great successes, like with the Tok Pisin Bible, but that took literally years to do and is not something that is repeatable in the same way due to changes in the organizations and personnel.
>
> If God is calling you to do that, though, don't let me dissuade you. Just don't expect me to join in that particular battle with you. ;-)
>
>