[sword-devel] Project “Free Scriptures” started

Sun Feb 23 21:41:37 MST 2014

Stephan,

We've had too many spammers signing up for the forums. About 400 a day, IIRC. So we shut down registrations as we look for a better option.

So here is a great place for such conversation.

It seems your email is combative. I hope it is just a language difference.

Regarding the SWORD project, we are very interested in digital freedom. You can clearly see that in our software license. It is GPL, so free and Free. I don't understand your quibble.

Regarding to texts, we convert texts from primary sources into SWORD modules. We do not modify primary sources. If we have issues, we report them back to the primary sources and let them modify their content. That allows everyone to benefit from the changes. We also don't publish texts from secondary sources. The SWORD module is an undocumented representation (other than in code) of those primary sources. We strongly discourage people from taking our transformations and re-publishing them. Instead we strongly encourage people to go to the same primary source, which is documented in every module's conf. For that reason (that primary owners keep their source), we don't keep a repository of sources from which we create modules. Seems to me that is a very strong support of digital freedom. We want everyone to have the same freedom we have without propagating any mistakes we may have made in creating a SWORD module. 

The only module that we retain the text for is the KJV. I am the maintainer for that source, and if you'd like it, just ask. It is freely available, but I've not been very good on making it clear what is the most recent version. So ask and it is yours. But please, don't republish the source, instead point them to me so they can get the benefits of the fixes I make to the source. (That said, you don't have to do that. You can post a copy and face the problems of fixing it.) If others report problems to you, please pass them to me, so I can make corrections for everyones benefit.

Many of our SWORD modules are under current copyright and we have obtained legal permission to distribute the texts. We protect those rights.

Our goal is service to the Lord as we make His Word widely available to the whole world.

We welcome collaboration, but I'm entirely unclear whether or how you wish to collaborate on the SWORD Project. At face value, it seems you are dismissing any collaboration with us on our effort.

Hope this makes sense to you and that you understand.

In His Service,
	DM Smith

On Feb 22, 2014, at 3:02 PM, Stephan Kreutzer <skreutzer at freiebibel.de> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I just want to announce that the project “Free Scriptures” (see http://www.free-scriptures.org) was started some time ago, which has the goal of developing freely licensed software for processing bible texts into various output formats. It will also serve as platform for “language teams” who work on the digitalization, proofreading and reproduction of bible texts of their native language. This way, we hope to establish a repository of public domain and freely licensed bible texts, which are carefully checked and ready for processing. At the same time, the language teams will be responsible for preparing and publishing the bible texts according to the context of their own language. The international “Free Scriptures” platform is intended to help the language-specific “branches” of the project. As we promote free software philosophy and practices in the field of bible software, we’re therefore limited to bible translations which are either in the public domain or which are freely licensed initially. Not only are our software tools freely licensed, they’re also required to be usable on freely licensed computer software environments. We refuse to use or integrate non-free, restrictive, proprietary software, because digital freedom matters for each and every user, especially if it comes to a highly important topic like the text of the bible. Please note that price isn’t an issue at all as we face artificial legal and technical restrictions – freely licensed bible software and bible texts can be used commercially and non-commercially at the same time.
> 
> Since the SWORD project doesn’t seem to be much concerned about digital freedom (no repository of OSIS sources, only unreadable SWORD modules) or the quality of bible texts (no checking, distribution of incorrect texts), I hope you at least don’t hinder our efforts, since you too can benefit from them. Probably you may even improve your approach to one which is more compatible with other free (bible) software. If you have some questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us. We host a discussion board on our website, where guests have write access. At the moment, there are several posts present in German language, which only stay there for the purpose of translation.
> 
> As a first task, we’re working on a tool for converting OSIS to Haggai XML. In the past, we’ve specified Haggai XML as our own bible text encoding format, which is based on Zefania XML. Since neither Zefania XML nor OSIS are well-designed XML formats for bible text encoding, Haggai XML was intended as an improvement suggestion for Zefania XML. Zefania XML will now get improved to Zefania XML 2014, hopefully by keeping it’s basic and primitive structure, which is ideal for the digitalization of old, printed bible texts. If Zefania XML 2014 gets released, we will consider to replace Haggai XML as main input format for our tools by it. As for now, we automatically generate PDF, EPUB2/3 and XHTML from Haggai XML input. In order to do the processing for the German “Offene Bibel” (“Open Bible” – the only freely-licensed modern bible translation in German language, which gets translated collaboratively on Wiki software, providing OSIS output), we work on a simple, basic conversion from OSIS to Haggai XML, so that we can use all of our tools we’ve developed so far. Those tools will get migrated to “Free Scriptures” within the next time.
> 
> 
> Sincerely,
> Stephan Kreutzer
> 
> 
> PS: I can’t register to your forum, the registration form gives a 404.
> 
> 
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