Dear Ven. Pandita, Gunnar, Lennart, Hugo and friends,

first of all, Gunnar is right to point out that the CSCD was freely
distributed to anyone interested in the Pali Tipitaka. Only I am not
sure if there is any more copies of the third version left. However,
those days when you have to get a free copy from the distributor is
over, i.e. with these CD-burners nowadays. ;-)

I have indeed learnt elsewhere that VRI is preparing a newer version
of CSCD, which I believe in another great meritorious task. I am not
sure if the next version will still be free, but I would still look
forward to it having better text formatting, improved clipboard
functions, Unicode support, more contents, more and better utilities
(such as the planned Pali-Burmese dictionary), and hopefully a
Unicode font which include all the South Asian and Southeast Asian
scripts.

Bhante, your proposal is marvellous, but note that going Open-Source
is not without its disadvantages. However, as an "Open-Source" guy, I
really support the idea. Afterall, I believe that the Dhamma should
belong to everyone. I wish the project a success.

By the way, how would you suggest we make a collective appeal?


metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Ashin Pandita wrote:

By freeing the source code, many volunteers around the globe would
view the source and give feedback in the form of bugfixes,
improvements, etc. at no extra cost to VRI. The same volunteers would
port the software to various platforms, and these ported softwares
would still bear the credit to VRI.

In short, CSCD in the form of an open source project would achieve
much greater usability with less cost. This option makes sense even
from a business point of view.

Now if you agree that this is a good idea, I think we should make a
collective appeal to VRI.