<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Troy A. Griffitts <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:scribe@crosswire.org" target="_blank">scribe@crosswire.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Re: Dual Ownership<br>
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Yes, CrossWire as always had the policy of requiring ownership be also granted to CrossWire for any contributions which get added to our repository. This has been discussed many times and should be posted conspicuously in multiple locations on our website (I hope it is still). It doesn't mean the original author loses their ownership, but they must grant ownership rights also to CrossWire. The reason has indeed been that Bible societies, translation organizations, and other ministries have at times asked to use our engine within a work which is not GPL and we consider their request and almost always grant permission. I personally am not religious about the GPL. My personal goal is to write free software to aid ministries to serve their people groups. If they feel their ministry is served best by asking for donations or selling part of their work to fund future work, I may not always agree with them, but that is their choice. I don't feel it's my place to dictate to them how their ministry should be run, at the risk that I won't aid their ministry. If anyone would have submitted code or a patch which included a copyright notice by other than CrossWire Bible Society or by any other license than the GPL, it would not have been accepted. The reason I didn't choose an MIT style license is to better encourage commercial vendors to contribute back to our code, if they ever find parts of it useful. That hasn't worked so well :( I hope no one feels they have been cheated. We have always openly maintained this policy and the copyright notice is universal throughout our code base. I also hope we all feel the same about still aiding ministries where it would be difficult for them to change their product licenses to GPL.<br>
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Troy<br>
<br></blockquote><div>I think this is a good policy since it makes us accountable to God. </div></div></div></div>