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

[Mag. Alexander Szlezak]

Hi Henri,

Henri Bergius schrieb:
> 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.

Ideed there is a common goal to reach widespread acceptance with the 
difference that IKS does not seek (or needs to seek) financial return. 
Trouble is Gentics is no foundation like Apache foundation.

> 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.

It would be good to test that out, and especially focus on the plugin 
question because I see the potential here (as mentioned below) to solve 
the licensing issue.
> 
>> 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.

I guess we made a first step, by releasing early. There's still a lot to 
be done and a lot adjustable.
> 
>> 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.

That is a part we're discussion intensively. Java Script Libraries don't 
really fit the GPL/AGPL definitions of API's, but still, even with the 
help of FSFE it could be a feasible way to cooperate with a AGPL Core 
and Plugins in whatever License people like.
> 
> 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

Thanks for pointing that out. That is actually one of the reasons for 
not releasing as apache/bsd. We did test a lot of JS Frameworks and amon 
the usable ones, apache/bsd was no available.

> 
>> Arjé Cahn
> 
> /Henri
> 

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