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

[Michael Johnson]

For what it is worth (probably not much), I have a repeatable conversion script from Lockman markup (latest edition), and have converted the NASB 1995, the Amplified Bible, and 2 of their Spanish translations to Sword format and Browser Bible format. I threw the former away, for lack of permission to publish, and posted the latter on https://eBible.org/study/ and https://cyber.Bible/study/. The impression I got from Pike Lambeth was that the long delays and history with CrossWire had kind of soured things,
so I just dropped it with him and thanked him for the permission I got, which was only for those two specific web sites and that particular format. Anyway, the moral to this story is that we should not waste Bible copyright owner's time or promise to do something we cannot deliver in a timely manner.

I appreciate the ability to display a proprietary translation alongside the others on the same web page, but honestly, it kind of leaves me filling empty compared to what you can do with the freely distributable and sharable Bible translations that are Public Domain, Creative Commons licensed, or otherwise explicitly permitted for use in all Bible study apps and formats.

On 3/12/19 3:29 PM, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> 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,


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