I've only got a few min, sorry for the brevity in my responses:

Olive Tree, Laridian, etc. make their money off of the cross-licensing of the content that they use to make the modules (they purchase a license to produce and resell to a certain number of persons, they charge you a piece of that licensee fee plus development costs related to making the content fit their format and reader, plus any support costs).

The formats that the modules use tends to also be proprietory as well. Their profts come from selling you a reader that (at one time) has licensed content which may or may not be as featured as that content+reader from another electronic bible software maker. Creating a Bible reader that reads their formats is a catch 22 for them. They get the additional market, but the lose control of (some) of the exclusivity that their reader application (the platform) provides.

Personally, I wish they all used the same format. With the reader being the real differentator. This has been possible for a long time, and has been argued too much. No electronic Bible software company is moving in that direction as the profit margins for this market tends to be slim as it is and most want to keep their current streams instead of opening that up. Ask me in a year or two how opening up the NYTimes has kept them from going under and I'll have my point there.

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Like some of you, I too would prefer just a basic reader that then uses a plug-in based feature to add the additional functionality. From the side of application design, if you make a solid and simple foundation, adding functionality later becomes easier, and in some cases, smarter. For example, maps. A maps module could be created by NavPress or LivePlanet, where they charge for the module (it costs time and money to develop/test), but it works within app easily. OSS allows that, and it keeps the field open for innovation for all IMO.

Pirating is mainly a concern where people see more value in the product than what it is being charged for. The solution there is really simple

The numbers aren't *yet* in Maemo's favor as being a duitful platform for them to care about (smartphones are 13 or 23% of the total mobile phone installed base; high-end smartphones are smaller than 30% of that number; Maemo is smaller stil; there are over 4 billion registered mobile phone users).

If Katana turns out to be a pefect model for a Bible application (simple basic UI/UX, plug-in system for additional modules, open development), then that would defintely get the eyes open towards more profitable platforms and could endear change to happen. Not that I'm not in favor of that, but it wasn't the reason I started the thread.

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A Bible application should be simple. Open the app, text is there. One click to search/go-to; swipe to move pages. Any more steps that that is too complicated and takes the focus from reading the Text to navigating the software.