Today I’d like to draw your attention to The SWORD Project, which I think is one of the most exciting open-source endeavors currently taking place. The CrossWire Bible Society is pursuing a number of projects, and their aim is “to produce a free, open-source, cross-platform Bible software engine: the SWORD API.” I welcome the idea and personally feel it’s got a great potential. I am finishing a review on MacSword (hope to post it soon!), which is the Mac OS X front-end for their search engine, and another one will follow on The Sword Project for Windows.

The whole thing works this way: different developers volunteer to build applications and graphical interfaces for the various platforms. Each application is OS-specific (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.), but it is based on the same search engine and the same collection of electronic texts. This has a number of advantages. Although I would not say any of the incarnations of the core engine that I’ve seen and used is a “finished” product yet (particularly if you compare them with the commercial packages — or even some of the more sophisticated freeware/software alternatives), we’ll have to follow future enhancements very closely. It does look promising.