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author | Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> | 2011-09-07 15:43:44 -0400 |
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committer | Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> | 2011-09-07 15:43:44 -0400 |
commit | 0d8ed6481b8d6caee0fc6f166bac7a382a10d733 (patch) | |
tree | 58e3acb1c3930c85a91a54fa190407b155f6040a | |
parent | 936541128d0da3e456143c53fe0e8523bb128813 (diff) | |
download | ikiwiki-0d8ed6481b8d6caee0fc6f166bac7a382a10d733.tar ikiwiki-0d8ed6481b8d6caee0fc6f166bac7a382a10d733.tar.gz |
license analysis; another possibility
-rw-r--r-- | doc/plugins/wmd/discussion.mdwn | 55 |
1 files changed, 55 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/plugins/wmd/discussion.mdwn b/doc/plugins/wmd/discussion.mdwn index ec8f02e4d..42af97ec3 100644 --- a/doc/plugins/wmd/discussion.mdwn +++ b/doc/plugins/wmd/discussion.mdwn @@ -4,3 +4,58 @@ From what I've read on the Internet, wmd-editor is not (yet?) free software by i But it looks like somebody recently took the step to rewrite a wmd-clone under a saner license, see [[pagedown|http://code.google.com/p/pagedown/source/browse/]]. Given all the above, what about upgrading this plugin to use pagedown instead of wmd? It seem a clear win to me... + +> AFAICS, pagedown is a modified version of WMD. Let's +> look at its license file: --[[Joey]] + +<pre> +A javascript port of Markdown, as used on Stack Overflow +and the rest of Stack Exchange network. + +Largely based on showdown.js by John Fraser (Attacklab). + +Original Markdown Copyright (c) 2004-2005 John Gruber + <http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/> + + +Original Showdown code copyright (c) 2007 John Fraser + +Modifications and bugfixes (c) 2009 Dana Robinson +Modifications and bugfixes (c) 2009-2011 Stack Exchange Inc. + +Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a +copy [...] +</pre> + +> Ok, so it says it's based on showdown. John Fraser wrote showdown and also +> WMD, which IIRC was built on top of showdown. (Showdown converts the +> markdown to html, and WMD adds the editor UI.) +> +> I can nowhere find a actual statement of the copyright of showdown or +> WMD. <http://code.google.com/p/wmd/> has a "MIT License" notice on it, +> but this is clearly just the license chosen when signing up at google +> code for the repo that would be used for a rewrite of the code, and the only thing +> said about the previous 1.0 release of WMD is "use it freely", which is not +> specific enough to be a grant of license, and is moreover not a free +> software license, as it does not cover distribution or modification. +> +> Which was all covered in the thread here, +> when StackOverflow decided to start working on pagedown. +> <http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/12/reverse-engineering-the-wmd-editor/> +> This thread does not give any indication that they ever managed to get +> a license grant for WMD/showdown. It frankly, does not inspire confidence +> that the people working on this care about the license. +> +> It would probably be pretty easy to adapt the ikiwiki wmd plugin +> to use pagedown. But without a clear and credible license, why? +> +> (Note that I have a wmd-new branch in my ikiwiki git repo that +> uses <https://github.com/derobins/wmd>, which was an earlier +> version of pagedown (probably, not entirely clear).) +> +> An alternate alternative is markitup: <http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/> +> It has a clear history and a credible license (MIT or GPL dual license). +> It's also easily extensible to other formats so could handle rst etc. +> It does not, however, have a markdown to html converter -- for +> previewing it has to talk to the server with AJAX. +> --[[Joey]] |