Open Source

After seeing about 50 responses on Twitter to a casual comment about the USCCB not being able/willing to allow open access to the Bible (NAB or NABRE translation) or Catechism of the Catholic Church to developers like me (and many others), I thought I'd simply post here all the information I have about the current situation, and what might be able to be done to remedy this situation...

[I set up this little petition just to allow people to voice support. Petitions don't help change things in the Church, but it's good to see what kind of things people would like to see happen!]

Correspondence with USCCB about licensing/access

I have contacted the USCCB twice now, asking once on behalf of the Archdiocese of St. Louis (I used to work there as Director of Web Development), and once on behalf of flockNote, Open Source Catholic, and Midwestern Mac. Both emails asked a simple question: Is there any way I could get access to the only USCCB-approved biblical translation and CCC translation so I could use these translations in mobile apps and websites?

I was hoping to see if they would offer the works under some sort of free license that would allow Catholic developers the ability to build apps including Catholic bible texts and CCC integrations (something like the Westminster Shorter Catechism in 90 Days study guide app, but for Catholics). But the responses I've received have been less than encouraging—see the forum topic Public Domain Catholic Bibles for the full details.

The gist of their responses: They have things 'in the works', and anyone can get the bible and CCC on Kindle ('for a low price...'), and they're working to allow brief excerpts (but definitely not a whole chapter or section) to be emailed to people.

Current Access to Catholic Catechisms and Bibles

Currently, there's a $17 Catechism for the Kindle (where the paperback version is $9), as mentioned by @BrandonVogt1 on Twitter. He appropriately tagged that with the #EvangelismFail tag... why is this not free in eBook format, at a minimum?

And the ONLY canonical source for these texts is the USCCB website, which is still set up like a 90s era website, with a link structure by which people can access any book of the bible, or chapter, but there's poor/no search ability, and it's hard to actually discover topical information, or find particular topics or indexes of either the Bible or the Catechism on the USCCB's website.

There are a few companies who have paid (large?) licensing fees to the USCCB to use the official translations in their software and websites—one in particular is the Logos bible software, which charges $17 on top of the fee for their software for access.

Resolution

The most helpful thing the USCCB could do is allow completely free and open access to the texts of both the NABRE and CCC by anyone. But as I see this is quite unlikely to happen (but I'd be very happy to be surprised!), I think something like the following could be more amenable:

The USCCB could have a NABRE/CCC API available to developers—could be something simple like JSON or something—and developers could send a request for, say, CCC #2150, and their API would return the contents of that section.

To gain access to this API, a developer would simply need to register an account and authorize access, getting a token in the process that would allow them to request up to one chapter of the bible at a time, and one section (or a group of sections) from the CCC at a time.

If the API tracked calls, then developers would be allowed a certain number of calls per day for free; any more than that, and the developer would need to pay some small fee per month/quarter/year.

Developers could cache the results of API calls for a certain period of time—say, 1 day, 1 week, or 1 month—so their apps and sites would be able to run faster. But data would need to be refreshed to ensure the integrity of the translation, including any textual updates.

I don't know if this is going to happen, and I don't think it will, but I pray that this might possibly be considered someday. (I've talked about this before, but got no traction).

If I, as a Catholic developer, have to continue to use old English translations of the Bible from the Vulgate, or the King James Version (not even Catholic!), I'm at a major disadvantage. Information wants to be free—and right now, some of the fundamental parts of our faith are locked up under strict licensing restrictions.

Today, January 5, Drupal version 7.0 was released (download Drupal here). Drupal 7 release parties will be held worldwide on January 7 (which also happens to be my birthday - yay!).

I'll be posting my experiences in upgrading to and extending Drupal 7 both here and on my blog at Midwestern Mac, LLC (see D7 stories).

Congratulations to the team of almost 1,000 developers who helped make Drupal 7 a reality, and congratulations to Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and webchick, the person who shepherded (and continues herding) the community as the Drupal 7 core maintainer!

This website is still running on Drupal 6 (on a multi-site installation with about 5 other sites), but I'm slowly beginning the process of redesigning and upgrading the rest of my sites (notably, so far, Midwestern Mac, LLC) to Drupal 7. The Archdiocesan website and St. Louis Review will take a bit longer, since there's a lot of custom code that needs to be refactored.

If you run a website, have you checked out Drupal before? It's a lot more extensible (in my experience) than Joomla or Wordpress, the two other top contenders. If it's good enough for large sites like the White House and Examiner.com, it's good enough for you ;-)

A few weeks back, after finishing a full day of swimming in PHP, HTML and CSS, I was pondering the great mystery of human existence, but probably had a little too much to drink. The result?

You can buy the design on the following products (via Zazzle):

• Catholic Programmer's T-Shirt
• Catholic Programmer's Mousepad

Would you like the design on anything else? I could do a mug, or socks, or anything else in Zazzle's catalog...

Alternatively, can you think of a way to code this better? ;-)

...and now anyone can set up a fresh, hosted Drupal 7 website in seconds—for free.

From Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, and president of Acquia, the company behind Drupal Gardens (basically, a site like wordpress.com, except with more awesome):

Today we’ve reached another important milestone at Acquia: Drupal Gardens is now in open beta. No more beta codes. No more waiting to try the service. Now anyone can access Drupal Gardens and create a free Drupal 7 site!

I expect this service, and others like it, to grow in popularity in the coming years. For many parishes, a site on Drupal Gardens would do 90% of what they'd need (or 100%, if they weren't shooting for the stars...).

And it's free (for basic plans), community-based, and super-easy to use (the theme developer is especially nice). On top of that, you can, at any time, download your entire site and put it on your own web host!

In the Archdiocese of St. Louis, I manage more than 15 separate Drupal websites (plus a few others), and I have often wanted to use Apache Solr for search across all these sites. I finally had some time to tackle this issue, and I have a pretty good (and very fast) Solr server set up, and this server is shared across all these sites on two (so far) different webservers through two different hosting companies.

The main Archdiocesan sites (archstl.org, archstldev.com, and stlouisreview.com) are all hosted via SoftLayer in Dallas, while Catholic Youth Apostolate sites (like stlyouth.org and cycstl.net) are hosted via Hot Drupal in North Carolina.

I was able to set up a linode (linode.com) for less than $20 to run Apache Solr via Jetty, and that server is then accessible to all our other servers to send and receive search index data. This solution allows our main web servers to keep resources free from expensive MySQL search queries and the large databases that result from storing 20k+ nodes' search data in the main site DB.

You can find the process by which I set up the search server in this issue on the Development website. The best thing about this system is that I can really make the search server fly; ping takes about 30-40ms between the search server and our other servers, and queries only take about 150-250ms to reach the websites.

Any large organization looking to vastly improve search performance (and usability), especially on a Drupal site (it's so easy, with the Apache Solr Search Integration module pluggable right out of the box), should look into setting up a dedicated search VPS or server (depending on your search traffic).

Our linode Solr server typically sits close to idle, even at peak hours (right now it's showing 0.00, 0.00, 0.00), and I'll probably set it up to do some other tasks off-site as well, since it has the spare CPU, memory and disk space available (and a really fat pipe to the Internet!).

According to Dries Buytaert, a Franciscan Monk was working on Drupal Core at DrupalCon SF last week; he was involved in the core developer's summit with 149 other attendees.

[At Drupalcon, we] organized a core developer summit with 150 attendees, 16 lightning talks, 11 breakout sessions and 1 Franciscan monk.

Where are the Jesuits? The Dominicans? Any other orders? In the Archdiocese of Saint Louis, many of the curial websites are running on Drupal. I also hear the Legionaries have a lot of Drupal involvement (for instance, their Familia website).