Project “Free Scriptures” started

[skreut...@googlemail.com]

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.

As the “Open Scriptures” project seems to recognize the importance of free licensing in comparison to the dangerous and contra-productive pragmatism of the “Open Source” approach, we hope to collaborate with you whenever possible, but please also note that our time is very limited and there’s a lot to do. If anybody has some questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us. We also 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