Bible Societies, Outreach Ministries, & Publishers

The CrossWire Bible Society seeks to forge new relationships with Bible societies, outreach ministries, and publishers. Thus far, the majority of our work has been distributed directly to end users and has relied on publicly available electonic editions of texts. However, part of our purpose is to serve other ministries in a technical capacity, and further growth of our own projects will require input and contributions from other organizations.

CrossWire seeks to support other Bible societies by supplying technical expertise, in cases where those Bible societies cannot afford to or do not wish to maintain their own engineering staffs. We already have a very capable software library that can be used for building new Bible software of many types, ranging from simple Bible reading & study software to distributed/collaborative authoring & editing tools and textual analysis tools. Using our SWORD Engine is completely free of charge and any tool built upon it can easily access our growing library of over 200 electronic texts. While our standard license is the GNU General Public License (GPL), we are willing to discuss alternative licenses.

Ministries desiring to distribute electronic Bibles and Bible software are invited to consider using our software. It is and will always remain completely free for distribution. This does not mean that distributors cannot charge a (hopefully nominal) fee, however, as this is permissible under the GPL Copyright.

Copyright holders such as Bible societies and publishers are also encouraged to consider our system as a platform for publication. Using the system does not require paying any royalties to CrossWire. We would also certainly appreciate the assistance of copyright holders who would be willing to allow us to distribute their works, so that our electronic text library may continue to grow. To protect copyright holders' work, we support 128-bit strong encryption of content in our format.

If you feel there is some way we may serve your organization, or if you have further questions, please contact us at support@crosswire.org or by one of the other means discussed on our contact page.