Resources

Mission

An introduction outlining what project Free Scriptures is about on the practial level.
Tim Jore of Distant Shores Media laid important groundwork with his book “The Christian Commons”, which gives a problem description, elaborates on what digital technology changes for the creation and dissemination of christian works and suggests ways to solve the issue. One remarkable position of his is that we don’t need so much to improve the wealth of works in the western world, but should care more about the miserable situation for most language groups regardless of their size. On the other hand, he believes that artificial restriction of christian works isn’t unethical, which has to be disagreed and suggests he’s more in favor of an Open Source than a Free Software approach. His book is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 3, and it deserves translation into other languages as well as annotation. If somebody wants a hardcopy of it, we will try to provide it, but also consider the online HTML, EPUB and PDF version.
Tim Hutchings on Digital Bibles and the Future of the Book presents a more critical perspective regarding the Bible text in its digital form.

Technical

Simon Cozens presents the SILE typesetting system (code repository) at the FOSDEM 2015 in Belgium. Comments on the project will follow soon.
Demonstration video series on our Free Scriptures software package (code repository), in particular the osis2html1 workflow, the osis2pdf1 workflow, the vpl2haggai1 program and the osis2epub1 workflow.
Open Scriptures operated by Weston Ruter came into existence after the German Bible Society threatened various sites including a much-appreciated bible study tool on zhubert.com. Since then, efforts continue to improve the interlinkage of data and Scripture. Unfortunately, many resources on the historical background vanished, maybe we should start to try to preserve them.
Freely-Given.org by Robert Hunt provides a collection of Bible texts in various formats and the “Bible Drop Box”, an online Bible format conversion service. He is also a user of and contributor to the Open Scriptures project. Unfortunately, he’s concerned about price, not liberty. The materials provided on his website need to be furtherly examined.
Tony Graham speaks about the special difficulties in producing an EPUB from OSIS at the XML Prague conference 2012. It remains unknown if any of the code or material got released under a free license, but at least the recording might be of help in terms of what problems one might face during the implementation of a transformation workflow.

Texts

Offene Bibel (“Open Bible”) is an effort to create the first freely licensed modern Bible translation in German language, the license is the Creative Commons BY-SA 3. Translation work takes place on a Mediawiki, and a parser exists to download, validate and convert the text in Wiki syntax to OSIS (we maintain a fork of it where the HTML exports for e-Sword and Logos were removed).
The Fribibel (“Free Bible”) too is an attempt to create a freely licensed modern Bible translation in Swedish language. Unfortunately, they picked Creative Commons 0 as their “license”, which allows derived works to be restrictively licensed. It’s not clear whether or not a method exists to export the text to a semantic XML format. The project seems to be inactive (as of March 2015).

The situation in Sweden is especially interesting because they got to experience first-hand what it means to become a victim of the copyright regime, as the population amounts to around 9 million Swedes, so Hollywood movie productions usually don’ get translated into Swedish. Therefore, most Swedes speak English and don’t want to wait till US movie releases get introduced into the Swedish market, so they’re aligned to the US release while there’s no way to legally obtain or watch a movie in their own country. This lead to widespread familiarity with peer to peer filesharing techniques, and it’s no coincidence that the famous BitTorrent tracker “The Pirate Bay” was founded by Swedes (see Steal This Film 1 and The Pirate Bay – Away From Keyboard for its history), and its raid lead to large protests and later to founding of the pirate party in Sweden, which got imported into several other countries as well.

As the former Piratbyrån and later groups in and around the Swedish pirate party are well known for pushing the debate about copyright (Steal This Film 2) and creating alternative models (Flattr for instance), a freely licensed translation of the Bible in Swedish language is closely related to this efforts. One can learn more about the legal situation of Swedish translations here, here and here.
Our German branch Freie Bibel (“Free Bible”, code repository) digitizes, proofreads and reproduces old German translations for which copyright has expired.

You know somebody or a project or resource somehow related to unchaining the Bible in the digital age, have spotted a detail that’s missing, a misrepresentation or inaccuracy? Don’t hesitate, let us know about it! We will check submissions in regard of their social, technical and legal freedom and comment on them. You may use our contact form or post to the discussion board (no registration required).