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Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

Atlassian, before Atlassian, asked me to open source my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-)

[Edit] "Engine" is ambigous, wiki render engine would be more precise [0]. To be transparent and because it is not and was not my intention to mislead people: the code was a library that rendered Wiki markup into HTML and had a plugin/extension system to e.G. render syntax highlighted code, diagrams and integrate with third party systems. It implemented this with a macro system using {...} syntax. You would need to add at least load/safe e.G. with Hibernate to have a (minimal) Wiki application. But with Radeox you could create your Wiki app in perhaps 100 LOC.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200773455_The_Radeo...

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[edit] This is a response to the original unedited comment that claimed he wrote the first version of Confluence

I'm a former Confluence developer (2008-2013). I don't know anything about you or the detailed history of Confluence.

- When I started there were 12 people on the team including me. I wasn't there at the very beginning but some people on that team were and they would discuss design decisions from the start of the project.

- It was a spring-hibernate-webwork Java web application. Very complex and structured. Not your typical weekend project. Mike Cannon-Brookes (co-founder) of Atlassian wrote a book on this type of architecture.[0]

- They were always very open and forthcoming about open source they were leveraging. I don't remember this ever being discussed or mentioned.

[0] https://www.wiley.com/en-ie/Java+Open+Source+Programming:+wi...

[Edit] To make it clearer I annotated my initial comment because I don't want to mislead people.

[Deleted b/c it was inappropriate]

The wiki engine was called Radeox and rendered wiki markup into HTML. It was written in Java and open sourced from an existing Wiki application called SnipSnap [0]. If you have worked at Atlassian as a developer, you should have seen that name. It was also used as an example by Grails developers, e.G. in "The definitive guide to Grails"

References to it can be e.G. found here:

https://docs.atlassian.com/ConfluenceServer/javadoc/7.12.2/c...

The way macros are done and I have invented can e.G. be found here:

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-t...

I have discussed things with Mike Cannon-Brookes long before you've joined the company. Sadly the oldest mail I can still find from Mike to me is from 2006 and was not about this topic.

[0] https://github.com/thinkberg/snipsnap

In fairness, "Wiki engine" to me made me think Confluence was based off of XWiki or something similar and that you contributed that, rather than a Wiki macro renderer.

Additionally, Confluence being born from it seems like something someone should have the receipts to as well.

Maybe someone can reach out to Mike about it.

Yes you're right, apologies for creating a misunderstanding (see my edit above).

Not sure, it was 20+ years ago, but I might remember XWiki also using my wiki render engine back then, but I could be wrong ;-)

(it could be a reimplementation of the interface)

"The XWiki Syntax 1.0 was supporting Radeox macros."

https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Old%20...

The group of people back then was small.

I've started work on this even before Wikipedia was started, just as a point of reference.

Asking this in a friendly manner, but don't you feel bad that something you created was taken essentially for free by a corporation and monetized? Money isn't everything, but I would think it fair for the creator to receive their share

Every open source developer has been asking this question for the better part of three decades. Possibly four.

I think there's still a difference of using small libraries which contribute to a single or couple functions here and there, versus taking an entire open source product and wrapping a commercial structure on top of it. Could be hypocrisy on my behalf though

If you don't want that to happen, then don't release your software as free software. Use a CC-NC license or something similar.

I'm not nearly talented enough to build something open source someone else would want to commercialize

Those small libraries of “Hey, I figured this out so you don’t have to” aren’t asking for $10,000/mo. in support. The issue is open source software projects that become monetized by another company as a product for profit without following the Red Hat model of supporting the project.

Mostly not.

But sometimes yes, company created billions [0] and I haven't seen a cent :-)

[0] Yes, also JIRA

It's quite the resume bullet point I assume!

Worked as a manager/CTO for decades, it's not that important.

Now I work as a CTO coach for some years now - which I enjoy a lot - and it has even less impact there.

But perhaps I'll add "From the guy who put {macro} into Atlassian® Confluence®" :-) Thanks!

it is an impressive feat, sorry if it came across as negative! hopefully they treat you to dinners at least

So you're the one ultimately responsible for all the suffering it's wrought? It looks nice, but not having access to the plain text source for pages is infuriating.

No they wanted to have a wiki, it was fashion back then. I brought a lot of suffering with the {...} notation of macros though (also not using {/...} but {...}, but I was young)

I'm responsible for everthing like e.G.

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-t...

It's always telling when the top comment is about who gets to take the credit for whatever. I never understood that - you either sell your stuff or be fine with it being used by others for free

Yes, as I've said, I'm mostly fine and today would choose MIT over LGPL.

Why?

> my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-)

What is the name / URL to your wiki engine?

This is 20 years ago, I don't think it exists (not on Github).

A reference can be found on the (back then) famous C2

https://wiki.c2.com/?RaDeox

It was cut out from a Wiki application called SnipSnap

https://github.com/thinkberg/snipsnap

Found: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/radeox/

Did you do that before or after GPLv3 was released?

Before, but today I would choose Apache or MIT.

Why those in particular?

As free as possible. I want open source to be used without any restrictions (like the GPL) but without liability. I write closed source software to earn my living (just my view).

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