Re: [sword-devel] USFM -> OSIS -> Sword

[Kahunapule Michael Johnson]

On 03/07/2012 04:53 PM, Jonathan Morgan wrote: ...  I'm suggesting copyright is the wrong tool to use to enforce such claims, since I can't see that it will actually target the one responsible for the wrong.  I agree quality control is a great thing to have.  I disagree that wide-ranging and not readily enforceable copyright claims will achieve it. You are free to disagree about copyright being useful to ensure non-corruption of the text, but the copyright owners are also free to disregard your objection and act contrary to your wishes, anyway. I'm not the copyright owner. I'm one of the world's greatest advocates of copyright-free Bibles and senior editor of the World English Bible. I'm also in the position of asking for copyright permission and dealing with copyright owners' concerns. The #1 reason they give me for copyrighting Bibles is that they want some way to protect the text from corruption. Arguments to the contrary are futile. You will be assimilated. OK, maybe not assimilated, but ignored or disagreed with. At least that is what kind of a response I usually get. I'm just trying to preserve the fragile permissions I have gotten. Regardless of your feelings about copyrights and Bibles, we have a higher reason to not want to corrupt or mis-display Bible texts, anyway, so the copyright argument is secondary, anyway.   I understand the limitations of imperfect human programmers. What I expect is that: Each part of the whole Bible study software system from translation to module creation to back end development to front end display is carefully designed to correctly handle Bible texts without corruption. Reasonable care is taken by everyone involved to ensure that the implementations are correct. Reasonable testing is done. High priority is given to correcting any problems that result in corruption of the text. This is not unreasonable, is it? No, I agree with you.  However, my objection is that that is not what a copyright based requirement seemed to be saying. Two other things that occurred to me: 1. If your module uses a versification other than KJV, BPBible won't support it right now.  Other frontends may also not support it.  That will not show all the text of the module. That is a problem, for sure. It turns out that pure KJV versification is really rare. I guess I need to build a test into my software to check that, and give up on converting to Sword format if it isn't a proper subset of the KJV versification. That rules out the World English Bible as well as most of the minority-language Scriptures I'm working on. 2. If your module used a RtoL script, BPBible didn't support it until 0.5 late last year.  Other frontends may also not support it.  That may not show all the text of the module accurately. I haven't gotten any RtoL scripts to convert, yet, but it is just a matter of time... In both of these cases, I would argue that BPBible was actually behaving reasonably in the presence of technical limitations.  While there exists a large subset of modules which are supported and supported well by BPBible, it is a useful presence.  The idea of stopping the text being available in other frontends because of BPBible limitations seems very suspect to me. Is there any way we can tag a module as being of a version that requires support for alternate versification and/or support for RtoL scripts? Then only front ends with that capability could display it, and we wouldn't have to withhold the module from the front ends that don't.

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