Historically, CrossWire has always maintained that our data formats are
volatile. We optimize them, add new features to them, basically change
them if we feel they need changing. In reality one could say that they
haven't changed much in the past few years, but this is only cursorily
true. The internal markup forms we process in the data format has
changed significantly and continues to change. We don't encourage
projects to use our data formats directly because of this and the fact
that we don't want to be used as an authoritative document repository
(see previous email).
Summary: we don't encourage other projects to use our data sources for
their own projects; we encourage them to use our API. Our data formats
and internal markup change and we don't wish to maintain them as a
standard (primarily because we don't want to be the authoritative data
source for a work for other projects).
On 02/24/2014 01:30 PM, Daniel Hughes wrote:
I wonder if the fact that the sword module format is undocumented and
not published contributes to this perception. There are at least 4
different projects that I know of which implement sword module
support. And they have either had to look at the sword code and thus
accept GPL2 (no plus) licencing for there project or reverse engineer
sword modules from the ground up.
I can see how this would be perceived as closed behavior rather than
free and open. Publish your module format as a free and open standard
and you will probably avoid this kind of reaction to the sword
project.
God bless,
Daniel Hughes
On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 10:46 PM, John Zaitseff <j.zaits...@zap.org.au> wrote:
Hi,
Jaak Ristioja wrote:
In addition, although Sword is GPL, there are many obstacles for
outsiders to actually start contributing to the project, hence I
somewhat understand why Sword might be perceived as not Free
software.
One of the freedoms of the GNU General Public License is that anyone
is able to take and fork the code. By all means, go ahead and do
so!
The fact that no one seems to have done so (at least, as far as I
can see, successfully) shows that it is not all that easy to do:
apart from the actual coding, you have to convince other developers
and distributors to use YOUR fork, not the original project...
That said, other projects have been forked, sometimes with the
original essentially dying off (eg, XFree86), other times with both
forks going strong (OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice spring to mind).
Yours truly,
John Zaitseff
--
John Zaitseff ,--_|\ The ZAP Group
Phone: +61 2 9643 7737 / \ Sydney, Australia
E-mail: j.zaits...@zap.org.au \_,--._* http://www.zap.org.au/
v
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