Credits and licences

Bible Concordance was made by Erich P. Tonsing as a personal Bible study tool and is given away free of charge. Anyone may install, use, copy and share it at no cost, for personal, educational, church or ministry use. It must never be sold, licensed for a fee, or bundled into anything that is charged for, and it may not be used to sell the texts it contains. It is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind: use it at your own risk.

Everything bundled in the app is either public domain or released under an open licence that permits redistribution, and is used with that permission. Copyrighted modern translations (NIV, NKJV, ESV) are not bundled; they can only be viewed live, over the internet, with the user's own key from the publisher's platform, and remain the property of their publishers.

Bundled texts and datasets

Word-level Strong's-number tagging for BSB/KJV/ASV/WEB comes from the OSIS/USFM markup included in the above sources. Curated genealogies and "Firsts & Milestones" entries were compiled for this app from the bundled KJV text. Curated "Ask a question" answers quote scripture from the bundled Berean Standard Bible (public domain).

The reader's own notes, highlights, bookmarks and reading-plan progress are stored only on their own computer (userdata.db in the app's data folder) and are never sent anywhere.

Online-only translations (optional, user's own key)

Software

Built with Tauri, Rust, React, SQLite (FTS5, sqlite-vec), candle and Cytoscape, all under permissive open-source licences (MIT / Apache 2.0).

The Windows app's Content Factory puts its short videos into an MP4 file with Mediabunny (Vanilagy, mediabunny.dev, licence MPL-2.0), used unmodified. Its soft background music is composed by the app itself, from fixed musical rules, as it is needed: no recording is used.

Library (downloaded on request)

The Library screen downloads modules from the CrossWire Bible Society's free SWORD repository (crosswire.org) only when the user chooses them; nothing from it is bundled. Each module carries its own licence, shown in the Library before installing — most are public domain; some are copyrighted works whose publishers have permitted CrossWire to distribute them free of charge (e.g. the 1933/1953 Afrikaans Bybel, © Bible Society of South Africa). The verse-numbering tables used to read them come from the SWORD engine via the pysword package (MIT).

The Library can also browse other free SWORD repositories, again downloading only what the user chooses: eBible.org (Bibles in many languages), the NET Bible free edition from bible.org (© Biblical Studies Press), Wycliffe Bible Translators' minority-language Bibles, and CrossWire's Attic and Beta collections. Each item's licence is shown before installing.

The user's own books ("Add from file")

A user can add an EPUB e-book, a PDF book or a SWORD module they already have. These files are never bundled, uploaded or shared; they are converted to text and kept only on that user's computer. The app does not remove copy protection: copy-protected or password-protected files are refused. Users are responsible for having the right to use the files they add.

Bible story pictures (built in)

Each Bible story page carries one picture. In the Windows app it is built in; in the Android app the story pictures and the children's pictures are optional downloads (More → Downloads). The collections below can still be downloaded in full. Every file is the unaltered picture as Wikimedia Commons serves it (a 1280 px rendition), and each links to its Commons page with the full source details. James Tissot and Gustave Doré died before 1925, so the paintings and engravings are in the public domain. The scans of Tissot's Old Testament paintings by Phillip Medhurst and the Sweet Publishing illustrations are licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) and are shown unchanged, with their credit, under the picture. The 20 children's pictures (colour and colouring-in outline) are original artwork drawn for this app. The children's pages added later use a Sweet Publishing illustration instead (see below).

Pictures with additional stories (Android)

Stories, “Verses for…” pages and children's pages added after a version of the Android app was made reach the phone as one small file (the Fetch additional stories button), and the file can carry each page's picture. Each picture is shown with its credit, its licence and a link to its Commons page. The Tissot paintings are in the public domain and the Sweet Publishing illustrations are licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0); the Sweet pictures are shown unchanged. The outline to colour in that goes with a children's picture is a drawing made from that picture (its black pen lines only) and is shared under the same CC BY-SA 3.0 licence, with the same credit.

Bible pictures (downloaded on request)

Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons only when the user chooses a collection; each picture keeps a link to its Commons page with full source details.

Content Factory pictures and music (optional downloads)

The 331 nature photographs offered as backgrounds (one optional download of about 36 MB, in both apps) are all CC0 (public domain dedication) on Wikimedia Commons; each is listed with its title, photographer and Commons page in the pack itself.

The 55 Christian pictures offered as backgrounds (an optional download of about 12 MB: crosses, prayer, worship, stained glass, the Bible, communion and Christmas) are photographs from Unsplash, used under the Unsplash License; each is listed with its photographer and Unsplash page in the pack itself.

The optional free recordings are piano recordings from the Open Goldberg Variations by Kimiko Ishizaka (CC0), and carols and hymns by the US Army Band and the US Navy Band (works of the US government, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons). Photographs the Content Factory finds online come from Wikimedia Commons under a public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA licence, and are shown with their credit.

Read-aloud voice

Read aloud runs in a separate program shipped beside the app (resources/voice/), which the app starts and talks to over a local connection (127.0.0.1 only; nothing leaves the computer). It contains:

Because espeak-ng and phonemizer are GPL-3.0, the voice program as a whole is distributed under the GPL-3.0. Its complete source (server.py, make_voices.py, build.ps1, requirements.txt) can be downloaded from this website: voice-sidecar-source.zip. The unmodified sources of espeak-ng and phonemizer are available from the projects above. The rest of Bible Concordance is a separate program that only exchanges text and audio with it, and is not affected by that licence.