An invitation to an open-source project

I originally posted this first on LibriVox forum and am planning to send a copied version of it in an email to all members of Standardebooks (LLC) and some key figures in Project Gutenberg and the LibriVox project, to get their ideas of how to enhance my idea, what challenges might I face along the way, and what to expect in this endeavor.

Hello, friends. I came up with a feasible idea: What if we develop and maintain a non-commercial Android (and possibly iOS) app that combines the efforts of LibriVox, the Gutenberg Project, and Standardebooks?

The exact details of the project are as follows:

1 - Users must be able to easily access both the books and the audiobooks from within the application

2 - When a user clicks on a new sentence or paragraph, the cursor of the audiobook will be located at the corresponding line.

3 - There must be a search section to search both the database of books and the audiobooks

Committing to the first and third is relatively easy; however, the second one is particularly challenging, as it requires a significant amount of community work and presents some technical difficulties for the developers.

The heftiness of the work needed to be done for the second feature mentioned is demotivating; therefore, it would be a rational solution to not include it in the earlier versions of the app, since it both frees a lot of time for developers and contributors, and opens up space for making the community more interested and engaged in the project.

I can dedicate enough time to either developing the application itself or managing the servers and writing the backend code (I’m a full-stack developer), as I have always felt grateful for the wonderful open-source projects I have ever used, and now I want to do my part.

I insist that this project remains a non-profit endeavor, as it will be truly beneficial to everyone.

I have a few questions about the legalities of “public domain”, merging multiple licenses, and packaging them as a non-profit application to the end user.

First, do you think we should take control of the project? By taking control, I mean to devise the license of it in a way that nobody can redistribute it without making any changes, because if they can do that, then they would be legally allowed to publish the app in app stores without making any changes, this will result in a lot of confusion and might even cause possible legal problems (if the person who has used it committed to some shady businesses).

I believe that the project must be usable for all developers, and by that, I mean they should be able to import it into their own projects and use it of their own accord; however, again, the license of the root project must be clear on the exact line between what is allowed and what is not. Duplicate apps? BAD, use in your own project in a way that doesn’t confuse end users? GOOD

Second, who will be in charge of the chain of command for this operation? At the end of the day, somebody has to take responsibility and publish the app on Google Play Store or the Apple Store. Why would they accept such a responsibility? Are there ways to publish collaborative apps in a way that safeguards the publisher? How do we make sure that the person who takes on this responsibility is neither put at financial nor legal risk?

[Edit 1]

A possible solution that came to my mind upon re-reading this post was that if we publish the app under the name of a legal person, it would deny the need for having a natural person take legal responsibility for the app’s publication.

Third, in a hypothetical situation, if one of the three sources mentioned above claims a different kind of license for a specific resource, how do we handle the devising of the license of that particular book or audiobook?

And last but not least, IF we decide to accept donations for the shared efforts, what group of people will receive the donations? Obviously, a large sum of the money will be spent on paying the datacenter, and according to my personal experience, open source projects don’t really make a lot of money out of donations, so we might even come short of money for paying the bills of the servers.

[Edit 1]

If you know a programmer who is interested in FOSS projects or has valuable experience in maintaining a FOSS project, please share this post with them. It would really help.

Thank you for your efforts; they are indeed highly valuable contributions to our society. Sincerely, Yolowex