WebODF: Add ODF Support to your website, mobile or desktop app | Hacker News Reader

WebODF: Add ODF Support to your website, mobile or desktop app

webodf.org

59 pointsjervisfm16 comments

"If you are interested in using WebODF in your commercial product, contact KO GmbH for a commercial license."

I know why this kind of tactic is used, I understand people have to make a living, but I'm not keen on it, it's a form on FUD. It suggests that the A(GPL) depends on the use case, which isn't the case.

You can use AGPL in a commercial product as long as you adhere to the terms of the license, none of which exclude commercial use.

I've seen this tactic used a lot, I wish "commercial, closed-sourced, product" were used instead.

That said, really nice product, impressed.

Thanks for the observation. I'm part of the WebODF team. We certainly do not mean to spread FUD. Of course one can build a commercial product around WebODF without needing a license as long as the commercial product respects the AGPL license of WebODF. We have adapted the text on our webpage now. It is possible to use WebODF in a closed source product, but that requires a license from KO GmbH, the proceeds of which will be used to improve WebODF.

This looks really interesting and potentially very useful. I skimmed the docs and took a look at the source code. This is no small project. I could not find a high level doc about how it works, though. There seems to be contenteditable element as a user events (writing) receptacle from which it generates appropriate DOM manipulation. Since ODF is a complex format, the XML is complex too, so probably editing elements directly won't be feasible.

There is even a desktop version. I'd really like to try if this could work as a LightTable plugin. Code looks like straight forward JavaScript and it's build with Google Closure, like LT is. I'll how to dive through the code at some point and see how hard it could be to support different XML formats, like DocBook.

+1 nice idea!

Support for general XML is something that is very feasible. There is already an experimental branch (xml) on github for this. This branch has XML Schema support. XML Schemas can be read and the UI adapts to the schema. With CSS the document can be made to look nice for the user.

If you want to work towards this, please drop by on the mailing list or irc channel. It's high time for a good FOSS XML editor.

I agree, there's been too much a wait already for a good XML document editor, not a mere markup tool. It does not look like bigger players like Google and Facebook have interest in building components for this. Hopefully with LT, Brackets, Mondrian and now WebODF the necessary pieces are finally coming together.

Good to know you have already started the more generic XML work. I'll take a look and see if I can find something to dig in.

This has been integrated into the new version of ownCloud (http://owncloud.org) already, allowing for collaborative editing of ODF documents. It is pretty awesome.

It would be great to see businesses adopt open source document format as a primary documents format for web technologies.

Most businesses are slowly using the Web as an open source document format... not sure what your point is, or if we are in wild agreement! :)

Sorry if I was not clear. I meant to say that businesses should rely more on open document formats than on Microsoft's proprietary formats.

I was just going to say, that I really hope dropbox adds support for this.. I know owncloud is behind it, it's really cool just the same.

Well, that's awesome, but with an AGPL license it's not very useful for anything other than owncloud.

Do you mean it would be better if not open source and solely a proprietary product? AGPL exists and many startups (mine included) choose it because they see a simple (as in: good) business model while releasing the (whole) source code.

Maybe, at least in that case there would be more incentive for others to create another competing open source project. One that everyone can use commercially without some company acting as a gatekeeper.

Everyone is free to fork WebODF and at this moment there are 19 forks of it on github. So there is no single gatekeeper. We welcome everyone that contributes and we give active contributors favorable license costs for their closed commercial use. KO GmbH has chosen this license model to earn money that makes it possible to develop it further. As others have already observed, it is a large project.

I'm not arguing with any of that. Of course I understand why AGPL was chosen; if I was KO I would have done the same. But that kind of licensing is not something that I can trust, and all of those forks also need to be AGPL-licensed if I'm reading the license correctly.

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