

WebODF: Add ODF Support to your website, mobile or desktop app - jervisfm
http://webodf.org/

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davidjgraph
"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.

~~~
oever
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.

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jarpineh
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.

~~~
oever
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.

~~~
jarpineh
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.

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

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

~~~
hendry
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! :)

~~~
donniezazen
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.

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tracker1
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.

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

~~~
hbbio
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.

~~~
raquo
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.

~~~
oever
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.

~~~
raquo
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.

