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Question about copyright

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 8:46 am
by Dallas-p40
I think doing this an open source collaborative effort is a great idea and I would love to help in anyway. I have a question about copyrights however. It would be wonderful to HTMLify the scriptures and a host of other church owned resources such as church history and various scripture study manuals etc. How would we go about seeking the appropriate approval from the church to embark on such an effort?

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 9:16 am
by mkmurray
tomw wrote:I'd say find somewhere else to host for now. If things change, I'll let people know and you can move your projects.

Tom
Well I'll continue with my SourceForge registration then...anyone know which license I should put this project under? I don't really know much about the differences between them. I did the GNU License for my High Council program I wrote a little while back.

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:09 am
by WelchTC
Dallas wrote:I think doing this an open source collaborative effort is a great idea and I would love to help in anyway. I have a question about copyrights however. It would be wonderful to HTMLify the scriptures and a host of other church owned resources such as church history and various scripture study manuals etc. How would we go about seeking the appropriate approval from the church to embark on such an effort?
You need to get permission from the Church. Contact the Church intellectual properties department.

Tom

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:13 am
by WelchTC
mkmurray wrote:Well I'll continue with my SourceForge registration then...anyone know which license I should put this project under? I don't really know much about the differences between them. I did the GNU License for my High Council program I wrote a little while back.
This will be WAY more than you will ever want to know, but....

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-lis ... onLicenses

I may also add that this page is written by the Gnu organization and is somewhat biased. However it gives you a fairly good high level understanding of the different licenses.

Enjoy ;)

Tom

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:54 am
by mkmurray
Thanks. I was just informed by thegordo that he already submitted a SourceForge registration for this project. He will let us/me know when the project is approved so that we can move forward on this project!

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 4:27 pm
by bhofmann
tomw wrote:This will be WAY more than you will ever want to know, but....
You are right! That was WAY more than I wanted to know but it was very informative. I've never really understood the differences and am happy to know about this page. Thanks!

Permission from the church department

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 5:34 pm
by thegordo
tomw wrote:You need to get permission from the Church. Contact the Church intellectual properties department.
Just so everyone knows I have the number to call and will call them tomorrow
about getting permission to do some of these things.

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 8:03 pm
by mkmurray
thegordo wrote:Just so everyone knows I have the number to call and will call them tomorrow
about getting permission to do some of these things.
Just so everyone is clear, he is referring to permission to "HTMLify the scriptures and a host of other church owned resources such as church history and various scripture study manuals etc."

I think we should use a DB

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2007 4:19 pm
by Dallas-p40
thegordo wrote:I am wondering if anything has been done as far as developing an open source solution to this. I would be interested in starting a project. My tools of choice would be eclipse and java - java for the ability to be cross platform and eclipse because that is what I am used to and I don't have a lot of experience programing. I have thought of a simple design, but would be very interested in some help to develop a program to accomplish at least some of these goals. I also wouldn't mind trying to learn C#, so long as it can be complied by mono - I run Linux as my desktop of choice so making something incompatible is not something I am interested in, but I would also like it to be compatible with windows and mac, since I know others have differing opinions about what they feel makes a good computer.

My idea would take the online scriptures (and possibly anything on the church's gospel library site) and format it such that it would be easy to read, study, and record thoughts with. It would strip all of the original html. It would allow for highlighting, underlining, and bookmarks, with each of these being able to be organized in a few different ways. I haven't thought of a particular way of having persistent online storage of customizations, or of sharing these with others, but I would want to have the design such that this would be a possible solution. As far as persistent storage of the customizations, I don't know if a database backend or xml files would be better or easier. It would also be possible to create your own footnotes to reference other scriptures easily.

That is an overview of my thoughts. I know it isn't an online solution, but I would like it to be something like f-spot - a stand alone program that works well by itself, but also integrates with online resources. I haven't really written any code for it yet, and wouldn't have time to start anything until the BYU semester ends, but I am interested in helping to make this sort of program.

I definitely believe this should be a hosted web app and that we should use a database such as MySQL. We need to design it so that it will survive heavy volumes of traffic and perform responsively. I'm all for developing this application to run on a Linux host.

One other consideration is that it needs to be secure. Users will need to login to the app in a secure manner using a secure connection. I surely don't want some hacker to see what scriptures I have highlighted!! ;)

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2007 10:44 pm
by rmrichesjr
Dallas wrote:I definitely believe this should be a hosted web app and that we should use a database such as MySQL. We need to design it so that it will survive heavy volumes of traffic and perform responsively. I'm all for developing this application to run on a Linux host.

One other consideration is that it needs to be secure. Users will need to login to the app in a secure manner using a secure connection. I surely don't want some hacker to see what scriptures I have highlighted!! ;)
It seems to me that having the data local on your own machines should solve the security issue (if you manage your machines properly). Why then would you want it hosted on somebody else's machines?