[iks-community] Fwd: Aloha Editor is out.

[Henri Bergius]

Hi,

On 20 July 2010 12:04, Arje Cahn <a.cahn at onehippo.com> wrote:
> But a WYSIWYG editor is a totally
> different beast. I can see that it would be incredibly hard to make a
> living from something that has the potential of becoming a commodity
> component. In fact - to succeed, it must become commodity.

Yes, indeed. And as IKS seeks to commoditize (or at least make more
widespread) semantic technologies, that aim should be reasonably well
aligned between IKS and Gentics.

That said, no decisions have really been made yet whether Aloha will
be the basis for our semantic editor. As I've said before, we have
several requirements regarding how the editor works community-wise
that have to be checked and resolved
(http://wiki.iks-project.eu/index.php/Semantic_Editor#Requirements_for_the_editor).
Additionally, I just returned from a Medieval battle in Poland and so
haven't had the chance to look at the Aloha codebase.

The current idea is that after the Hackathon we should know whether
Aloha is the right thing for IKS, and vice versa.

> But it also reminds me of the time when the Xopus WYSIWYG XML editor
> entered the Apache ecosystem in 2001 through Cocoon and Lenya, and got
> pulled back again after 6 months into a commercial version.

I remember the Xopus episode, and it was a very disappointing one. The
upside with Aloha hopefully is that thanks to IKS we could build a
real, working community around it. Xopus was a finished product when
they open sourced it, so it was a lot harder for others to start
contributing.

> By asking developers to sign a
> "contribution agreement", you're adding a firewall that will scare
> away a large group of developers.

Agreed, requiring signed contribution agreements is usually a good way
to kill a project. Michael Meeks has written a pretty good commentary
on that:
http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/copyright-assignment.html

Of course, the question with both licensing and copyright assignments
is also on where the border between "Aloha core" that requires
copyright-assigned AGPL, and plugins that can be made by anybody is
drawn. If everything that IKS would do in context of the semantic
editor can happen in plugin space and be more liberally licensed, then
I don't see a problem.

Licensing in general is a tricky thing. If Aloha requires jQuery (dual
licensed MIT and GPLv2) and Ext JS (GPLv3), then that already limits
the number of licensing options we can use. Some more stuff about
this:
http://www.sencha.com/products/license-faq.php
http://stuck-in-windows.blogspot.com/2009/02/fud-over-javascript-and-gpl.html

> Arjé Cahn

/Henri

-- 
Henri Bergius
Nemein - Web Craftsmanship
http://nemein.com