CrossWire Bible Society
The CrossWire Bible Society is an organization with the purpose to sponsor and provide a place for engineers and others to come and collaborate on free, open-source projects aimed at furthering the Kingdom of our God. We are also a resource pool to other Bible societies and Christian organizations that can't afford-- or don't feel it's their place-- to maintain a quality programming staff in house. We provide them with a number of tools that assist them with reaching their domain with Christ. CrossWire is a non-income organization: all of our software and the vast majority of our study texts are offered freely, and while we do allow Bible publishers to charge for their Bible, if they deem it necessary, we encourage them to offer as many resources as possible for free and do not handle money for them or accept any portion of their collected money. Not only do we offer our services for free, but we also do not solicit donations to exist. We exist because we, as a community come together and offer our services and time freely.
The name was a pun of sorts, with the original idea that the Cross of Christ is our wire to God. Over the years, the meaning has grown into one more appropriate to what a Bible society is. The main purpose of a Bible Society is to distribute Scripture to as many people within a domain as possible. Some examples are the American Bible Society, the German Bible Society, the Canadian Bible Society, the United Bible Societies-- under which most of the Bible societies of the world collaborate-- and many others. You can view most of their stats of Scripture distribution to their region by visiting http://www.biblesociety.org/, then selecting a region and the Bible Society that serves that region. Instead of having a geographic domain, CrossWire's domain is software users-- predominantly the global Internet-- or anyone we can reach across the wire. Our Scripture distribution compares with the largest of the Bible Societies listed.
Some examples of recent collaboration include traveling to Wycliffe Bible Translators to present and counsel on strategies to open source their software, participation with the Amercan Bible Society to realize and promote the Bible Technologies Conference (http://crosswire.org/osis), and subsequently, the OSIS initiative (of which the osis-core and osis-users listserv lists are hosted on our servers at http://crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/osis-users).
