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

[Wernher Behrendt]

Hi -  let me contribute the coordinator's personal view on this 
discussion - following up what John Pereira said, yesterday:

1) The IKS community back in May 2009, identified "semantic editing" as 
a major theme for CMS
2) Aloha is one (of the first) of probably a bunch of emerging HTML5/JS 
based novel editing tools

Note at this point that "novel editing tool" IS-NOT-EQUAL "semantic editor"!
Aloha does a number of smart EDITING, but it has at present, little 
support for any "knowledge objects".
The mutual interest is in combining Aloha-style "novel/smart editing" 
with IKS-style "knowledge-aware" computing.

3) I would expect the IKS semantic editor develepment group to come up 
with specs and a prototype implementation (perhaps based on Aloha) that 
shows how I can easily enrich the text about an upcoming music event 
with "knowledge" (machine readable semantics!) about where it will 
happen, who will be on stage, how to get there and all sorts of 
background information (e.g. what music equipment the keyboarder uses on 
the song "Semantic Sunrise".) ;-)

4) While I appreciate the open discussion about Aloha's licensing scheme 
(we are all learning from the exchange and the emerging collective 
experience, here) I would like to point out that IKS' contribution 
should be in defining an OPEN knowledge-level API for any semantic 
editor, Aloha being the first one that has dared to come forward as a 
candidate implementation.

I guess Henri expressed something similar when he said he is not too 
worried at present. One thing should remain clear: IKS funded 
development is BSD/Apache based as defined in our legal framework. We 
should perhaps give the Gentics people a little more time to consider 
their licensing options, but everybody could in the meantime, contribute 
to developing a "knowledge aware" API for semantic editors, starting 
with reqs and specs. I would like to see the Helsinki Hackathon to go 
ahead in that spirit, irrespective of the licensing question.

Please let me know if my position is too liberal or flawed in any other way.

Best regards,

Wernher


Stéphane Croisier wrote the following on 20.07.10 22:41:
>
> On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Henri Bergius 
> <henri.bergius at nemein.com <mailto:henri.bergius at nemein.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     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.
>
>
> ... But the AGPL will see some.
>
> As far as I understand this thread, it looks like it is still unclear 
> if Gentics wants to adopt a dual-licensing or an Open Core approach 
> (or a pure community-driven approach).
>
> I agree with you Henri. If Aloha is built from a very modular manner, 
> it could be great to create a marketplace of "aloha modules" which 
> could be available under various open source or proprietary licenses.
>
> Then Aloha would rather follow an OpenCore paradigm by providing the 
> core under a very permissive license to rapidly gain a certain 
> traction and a momentum in the industry and Gentics (or others) could 
> resell dual-licensed modules/add-ons (or even fully proprietary ones 
> if they prefer) on top of this core.
>
> This would make sense as basic WYSIWYG editing capabilities are 
> already a commodity. And some "extensions" (e.g. some grammatical 
> checkers) are only availabe under more proprietary licenses.  So I do 
> not see a lot of added values to purchase some basic editing 
> capabilities and I would prefer to rely on a strong community of 
> developers to ensure the proper level of stability/testing/bug fixing 
> for such a core. But I do see some real potentials to buy certain 
> advanced "plug-ins" on a per customer need basis.
>
> However:
> 1) The OpenCore business model is also subject to a lot of criticism. 
> Precisely defining the boundaries between what belongs to the core and 
> what belongs to the modules is not an easy tasks. Conflict of 
> interests between the community and the vendor(s) may rapidly happen. 
> (cf: some cross-refs mentionned here: 
> http://stephanecroisier.jahia.com/future-of-open-source-cms )
> 2) Dependencies on ExtJS could be a real problem. It looks like ExtJS 
> considers that the viral effect of the GPL also impacts the underlying 
> server-side applications. This means that, if you want to integrate 
> Aloha as part of a proprietary CMS (or another dual-licensed CMS), you 
> would not only have to acquire a Gentics OEM license but also a ExtJS 
> one (now I am not a lawyer, so one has to legally check all these 
> constraints)
>
> So no ideal solution. Enforcing a real quid pro quo paradigm is not 
> possible with OSI licenses. I already wrote an article on this subject 
> back in 2004 (p.20 - http://www.methodsandtools.com/PDF/mt200402.pdf ).
>
> But an OpenCore approach with a truly permissive core (BSD/ASL) would 
> be perhaps the best manner to satisfy all the parties. Not sure 
> however it is possible to do with dependencies on ExtJS.
>
> Cheers,
> Stéphane
>
>     /Henri
>
>
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>    

-- 
Wernher Behrendt
Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft
Knowledge and Media Technologies Group
Jakob-Haringer Strasse 5/II
5020 Salzburg
Austria

email   wernher.behrendt at salzburgresearch.at
phone   +43 (0)662 2288 409
fax     +43 (0)662 2288 222
http://www.salzburgresearch.at

http://www.iks-project.eu
Bringing Semantic Technologies to Content Management

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