Davide's Notes

This post by Rubén Gómez on the life of Bible software touches a point I wanted to comment on before.

I understand the desire of producers of Bible software to make profit, but I don't think that Bible software is more complex than other open source software out there. Of course this is true of a full OS like Linux, but I suspect it is also true of other open source programs like for example office suits, graphical applications, compilers, editors, and games.

Being somewhat involved with open source software myself, I think that the short-livedness (and the shortcomings) of many programs may well lay in the fact that they are closed. Hardware dependencies have many times less impact than thought and are often driven by marketing processes rather than techological requirements.

When, a few weeks ago, I saw a post by Rubén on The Future of Electronic Synopses, and specifically the part where it said

one should be able to search for all the variant readings of any of the witnesses consistently cited in the Gospels, say B (03), for example, and build a whole B - Vaticanus - column alongside the standard critical text, Textus Receptus, Alexandrinus or whatever. These readings would have to be inserted at the appropriate point in the text, while the rest would read the same as the base text.

I couldn't help thinking, well, once the texts are available, what is the big problem? Moving and synchronizing columns of indexed data that presumably is part of a (in-memory, on-disk, remote, whatever) database?

So, the managing software itself can't be the problem. If it was, and if the problem was felt seriously enough, I wonder why institutions (universities, for example) would not set up collaborations e.g. with informatics departments to fix it. For what regards software development itself, this might of course be complemented with skills found in the open source world (of which there are plenty). Perhaps I am oversimplifying, but my point is that I don't see what's so special about Bible software.

Therefore, the big deal seems to be the royalties problem. This does not coincide but has a great impact on the problem of defining open publishing standards. Here we go back to the open scholarship problem; my position in these matters has always been (and Rubén seems to support that as well) that computer titles are not orthogonal to printed books. On the contrary, the wide availability of good computer titles may well help the sales of the associated printed material. I maintain that what we have today is limited distribution (limited relatively to what it could be) of printed copies also because there is limited distribution of online material, not the other way around. And I am not sure that DRM (Digital Rights Management) schemes will ever work: it is a well-known fact in the industry that encryption (of programs, data, text) does not generally avoid "unauthorized copying".

On the other hand, I do not think that, given reasonable royalties (and this is something I am not able to substantiate, as I have no idea of the amounts currently involved), this is what matters most: I think most people (and certainly most scholars) would agree that paying royalties to get access to a certain text is legitimate, given perhaps all the effort that has been put into the text itself. Most would not mind paying a fee, as long as it is reasonable (again, I realize this term is not well defined here). Examples from the music industry (Apple iTunes, for instance) might help. What worries people, as Rubén says, is the fact that one pays for titles that are tied to a given software, perhaps a given hardware (80x86, StrongARM, PowerPC, etc), OS (Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc), a given version of the OS, and maybe after all this the software itself does not do what we think it should, so we need to pay fees again to buy another software (which also costs money in itself) to overcome those limitations, and so on. And perhaps the company selling the software eventually goes belly up. Maybe, if enough interest was raised in the academic world, somebody might well think this to be a valuable project and set up an international workgroup to work on this and the royalties issues (by the way, there are so many EU-funded programs these days, see FP6 for example, that even something like this might be approved).

But perhaps the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique or other institutions already deal with these problems. If so, it would very interesting to know and to publicize those activities.