I was excited, but the fact that this is (well, WAS) violating the GPL by being MIT licensed was a major downer. I'd be very interested in an org-mode parser which is NOT GPL-licensed, specifically because it is effectively impossible to integrate GPL code as a plugin (unless your editor is also GPL), which was one of the stated goals of this project.

Hence, someone would have to properly clean-room reverse-engineer org-mode in order to achieve 100% compatibility, or make a somewhat-incompatible implementation based on the reference docs instead.

As I understand it, Markdown has significant limitations which org-mode doesn't have, but is under a 3BSD-style license. (It also has issues of x+1 slightly incompatible implementations)