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If EtherPad had been GPL I have my doubts Hackpad would have ever been forked from it or if Hackpad would have even been a thing.
by VieElm 11y ago
If EtherPad had been GPL I have my doubts Hackpad would have ever been forked from it or if Hackpad would have even been a thing.
- quadrangle 11y agoSo, maybe more people would have used and even contributed to Etherpad then… who knows
- rspeer 11y agoEtherpad was completely unmaintainable when it was shut down as a service and open-sourced. Its first, open-source major rewrite (etherpad-lite) didn't work. It took a second major rewrite by a profit-motivated startup (Hackpad) to become useful again. I think that if Etherpad had been GPLed, we would still have nothing but etherpad-lite, and we would lament Etherpad as a lost technology.
- kentonv 11y agoI'm curious what you mean when you say etherpad-lite "didn't work". I use it fairly regularly and while I'll agree it's not nearly as refined as Hackpad, it seems to basically function. (Note that I'm not debating the GPL point. I don't personally think Hackpad's forking the code has had any meaningful effect on etherpad-lite's popularity; there are plenty of collaborative document editors out there.)
- rspeer 11y agoIt would corrupt its data when too many people were using it at the same time.
- castell 11y agoWrong. The current Etherpad open source project and what you mean are not the same. The first one is the predecessor of Google Wave Java based product, and the current one "Etherpad Lite" is a JavaScript & Node.js based open source project - a reimplementation, possible as Google open sourced the original Java code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad
- kentonv 11y agoEtherpad was not a predecessor to Wave -- Wave was already released when Etherpad was acquired. They did use similar ideas, though.