HonKit: A Fork of GitBook | Hacker News Reader

HonKit: A Fork of GitBook

github.com

100 pointsmatsuu36 comments

For those who weren’t aware, this is the reason behind the fork:

> As the efforts of the GitBook team are focused on the GitBook.com platform, the CLI is no longer under active development.

— https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook#%EF%B8%8F-deprecation-w...

I get sad about this. This project moved from an open source model to a closed source one. I have nothing but sympathy for the team for doing this but I do wonder if there is an alternative way of monetizing and keeping the project open source.

Seriously- what are the monetization strategies for open source projects? I know red hat, hashicorp and others sell a enterprise support and hosting solution as enterprise add ons to their open source projects. Wordpress seems like a great community built around building widgets for non technical folks, but have the source code available for programmers to extend and modify.

Is it possible for one to sell software and have it open source?

I think the market for people who want books hosted and the market for people with enough dev skills to do it themself is separate. So they should be able to make their revenue from people who want easy hosting.

That being said, it seems like a doomed SaaS because the value add is pretty minimal. Maybe a one time charge would make sense, but I can’t find much value in monthly fees for something I can host on github.io for free.

The software is nice, but there are others.

In general, I don’t like “artificial” SaaS where the the fee is rent-seeking for something software runs for near zero marginal costs.

I’m so happy this project is picking up the fork. Gitbook was a great project, but they really moved everything to their SaaS with artificial barriers to just using the software.

It was cool that they left cli around, but as abandonware.

I thought it strange that it was such a non open source behavior to only support their monthly service even though one of the main benefits I see in static site generators is the flexibility of hosting and cost.

I feel bad for them as it must be a hard business to compete with Bookdown and other projects.

See also mdBook [0] for another alternative to Gitbook

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook

At a cost of worse design, I am extremely satisfied with mdbook. For an example, check The Rust Book.

What do you mean by design? I run a customized version of mdbook to render https://docs.hyperdeck.io

I’m fairly happy with mdbook (although it took some time to get the customizations work correctly)

On a side note, HyperDeck looks great! Is this open-source?

Thanks! It is not open source right now. I’ve been thinking about that, but initially it will probably be commercial, and then I’ll see.

Or bookdown:

https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown

I've switched from GitBook mostly to mkdocs-material for technical docs

There is also Jupyterbook https://jupyterbook.org/intro.html which has a slightly different focus, but seems pretty great.

I just spent a few minutes reading the readme, and I still can't figure out why this tool (or GitBook) is directly connected to git. OK, a bunch of markdown and json files in folders form a book. How is this connected to git?

I totally get storing the markdown files/folders in git, but surely any other version control system would be fine too?

Git has been a trendy word for a while, a bit like sticking "i" in front of your product name.

I don't understand why. People don't like master branch but they don't care about git which is literally a slang for an old senile idiot.

while true, it's also formally trademarked and GitHub and GitLab etc. have explicit permission to use the term. It's a trademark violation to use "Git" in reference to software products without the explicit permission of the Git project unless it's a mere reference in the direction of "Zinq is a tool that helps with Git etc" (it's not a trademark issue to mention interaction with Git, only to use it in the name as branding)

Ever since I got my first e-ink reader, I imagined the books being updated via revision control. Where a reader can encounter a typo or other error, and submit the correction right from the device for the author to review and accept or reject.

Books as git repos instead of static seems obvious, even inevitable, eventually, to me.

I think they wanted to be "the GitHub for authoring books". So there's one level of indirection, but it makes sense.

I wrote a sizeable book with gitbook and I found it to have substantial design flaws. Once the book had a few hundred files the rendering became exceedingly slow.

It became clear to me that, internally some sort of scaling problem is present in the code that manifests itself abruptly once the book hits a certain size.

Rendering to html would take 2-3 minutes (attempting to reload the latest version of a single page also triggers a complete re-rendering of all pages, obviously making the process non-feasible).

I migrated to bookdown that renders the entire book in about 10 seconds (and reloads single pages quickly).

I wonder if honkit fixed those internal design errors that made gitbook unusuable for me.

Never used gitbook so I have the following question: in terms of content creation, how does it stack up compared to sphinx?

I had many problems with sphinx, mainly site structure, gitbook was easier. But that was 5 years ago. Now I am switching to github wiki.

Tangential: How is GitBook/GitBook.com not trademark infringement of git?

Nobody is going to confuse Git with GitBook... GitHub on the other hand... But Linus Torvalds as savage as he is with crappy vendor code he is a reasonable guy.

The clarification of what’s in and what’s out was in 2017: https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...

Gitbook predates that’s so it may have been grandfathered.

Is this semantic markup for writing or is it like headers and paragraphs? I'm pretty much stuck in the LyX mindset when it comes to treating documents as code.

This is much needed as GitBook moved away from Book publishing and abandoned open source spirit.

So nice to see that gitbook-cli abandoned project is finally picked up again. How would the integration with Calibre work, since it awaits major changes in upcoming versions?

Anyone have a comparison between this and Docusaurus v2?

I hope the team is thinking of dusting of GitBook Editor too

desperately needed, going to check this out. we tried this gitbook enterprise product.. definitely headed in the wrong direction for our needs.

What's the name supposed to mean?

Probably from 本 == book, pronounced hon in Japanese. (The author also appears to be Japanese.)

Right. The original fork name was "GitHon" because hon == book in Japanese.

The author recently renamed "GitHon" to "HonKit" due to Git being protected by U.S. trademark law.

Hope they don't run into any problems with the "honk" memes.

It’s absolutely begging to get an extension called HonKitOnk.

Racist.

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