On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, Kahunapule Michael Johnson wrote:
Chris Little wrote:
GBF is a proprietary format and non-XML.
GBF is not proprietary, at least not as I understand the word. It is
non-XML. It is openly published, freely usable, and one of the first
formats supported by The Sword Project. In spite of its limitations, it
is still in use, and anyone is free to create derivatives of it if they
wish. That doesn't sound proprietary to me. Perhaps it would help if you
explained what you mean, really.
XGBF still lacks richness and openness. (U)SFM, at the time we chose
to standardize on OSIS, was a proprietary, not publicly documented,
non-XML, non-standardized format; when we asked for documentation and
offered to implement SFM in Sword, our offer was declined.
I'm sorry that happened. That was unfortunate.
USFX is proprietary and not a standard.
USFX is open enough, and can be made more open. "Standard" is relative.
My definitions of open/proprietary and standard are a bit ad hoc:
A format is proprietary if it is controlled by a single party who created
the format primarily for their own purposes and without any committment to
taking input from interested third parties. In that sense, GBF, ThML, and
sundry flavors of SF are proprietary. OSIS on the other hand would be
open. There's nothing inherently wrong with proprietary formats, we just
don't want to commit to one for purposes of archiving and internal data
representation. (Sword's own module formats are likewise proprietary.)
Extensibility doesn't make a format open; extensions just constitute
another layer of proprietariness.
And by "standard" I mean basically just that a format is intended as a
standard and has some degree of adoption. It's not really "standard" if a
format only has one user.
--Chris
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