Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

Why does the LDS church not publish it's software source code with a free/open source license? As someone who is subsidizing the development of this software, I think the code would be a valuable resource for all.

I asked one of the church's iOS engineers during WWDC last year why they did not open source the code and he gave an excuse about not wanting 3rd party scripture apps to steal their features. I'm sure there are other reasons for it.

In general I find the church's strong stance on intellectual property a bit strange (though certainly in line with some of its more corporate characteristics). The church doesn't hold copyrights and trademarks for monetary gain (as far as I know), so why worry about them at all? I think it would be great if all church materials were published under something like a Creative Commons license. Shouldn't we want this material to spread as freely and widely as possible?

And perhaps this is for another rant but the lack of pre-correlation historical material (conference reports, magazines) on lds.org is quite silly IMO.

I, for one, would not mind some nice third party apps. I mean, an API to get it hooked up would make for some excellent things.

Alternatively, I wish that someone would update the scriptures apps to have music (not just the words, but the notes, too) in them.

I assumed they didn't include the music for copyright reasons (for a few songs).

Yes. There are a few that have copyrights, but the church has the copyright permission for all of them, I assume. So that should make it super easy to get 'er done.

I'm not sure if permission to print in a physical hymnbook is the same as permission to distribute freely online...

Umm....I'm pretty sure there is already a music app put out by the church, it is just separate from the gospel library app.

Here it is https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lds-mus ... 53380?mt=8

At least they have one for iPhone/iPad...

...and thanks to lds.org, I know now that it is only on Apple devices. At least for now.

Source

Whistler wrote:I'm not sure if permission to print in a physical hymnbook is the same as permission to distribute freely online...

It's not. At least, not all people see it that way. We dealt with that a lot at the church when we were publishing family history books online. And LOTS of people who gave us permission to reprint or microfilm would throw hissy fits when they found their books online. So we had to make a new permission form that gave us rights to basically... everything. And we stopped publishing any books that we didn't have the new permission form for.

Of course, that meant we got a lot of people upset because they had given us rights to the books long ago and why hadn't we digitized theirs yet? [sigh] Can't please everyone.

thread = hijacked

It's kind of my superpower.

Two things.

1) The code for many of their projects is actually available: https://tech.lds.org/projects. However, for at least some of these projects, the code there is quite out of date. I thought I might start contributing to one of them a while back, and it turns out that managing contributors and reviewing contributions from people around the world (with unknown skill levels) was taking all of their time; the people that were hired because of their ability to write code were now just managing other contributors. There were literally hundreds of people signing up to contribute, and only a handful of developers to manage them. That's not an effective use of their time. So for many of the newer iOS projects at least, they haven't posted them on tech.lds.org, and for older ones, they've stopped updating the published version there and just gone back to updating them internally.

2) While documenting public APIs for church resources would be useful in allowing other people to make apps that connect to Church data, I don't see how publishing the source of the apps themselves is "a valuable resource for all." There's no guarantee that their code is especially worthy of emulation; like most projects, it's probably decent with some ugly parts. The church has no particular interest in publishing the code if they're not going to accept public contributions, (and see point #1 for why they're not doing that so much). Publishing APIs would be nice, but many of them are understandably sensitive (e.g. directory information), so it would have to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Further, then they have to manage the load on those APIs, which costs the church money if someone starts using them a lot.

It could be nice to have APIs for the church mapping information, for example. (e.g. Meetinghouse locations, temple locations, ward/stake boundaries, etc.), but are there any other APIs that would be useful? Is it worth someone figuring out all the permissions and provisioning and app revocation procedures?

I mostly just wish that I could have a different, more full featured scripture app on Windows Phone. Because I love the OS, and don't plan on switching anytime soon.

They're apparently going to touch on the Gospel Library for Windows Phone app in today's monthly LDSTech broadcast. http://tech.lds.org/blog/589