Re: [free-software-melb] [fsf-community-team] Free Mark Down Editor and Reader
On 09/04/2018 21:42, John Lewis wrote:
What software do you plan to blog with?
I'm very interested in this answer too as I'm also evaluating various software options for blogging. Andrew -- OpenPGP key: EB28 0338 28B7 19DA DAB0 B193 D21D 996E 883B E5B9
On Tue, Apr 10, 2018, at 07:44, Andrew Nesbit wrote:
On 09/04/2018 21:42, John Lewis wrote:
What software do you plan to blog with?
I'm very interested in this answer too as I'm also evaluating various software options for blogging.
By strange coincidence, I just started setting up a blog yesterday, something I've been meaning to do for years. (It'll be at blog.ljk.id.au — but with various life distractions, it probably won't be up and running for a week or two from now.) After considering a few possibilities, I settled on Hakyll, https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ It's written in Haskell (using Pandoc), which I guess is appropriate since I'm aiming mainly to focus on functional programming in my blog. On one of the pages, there's a list of sample blogs that use Hakyll, which you can take a look at to see what it can do. The downside is that you need to operate in the Haskelliverse, say via haskell-stack, though the commands are fairly boilerplate. The upside is that the code is very clean and typesafe, which is reassuring. And it'd be a lot faster than, say, a PHP-based solution. Hakyll just generates static websites from content files (in various formats, including Markdown), from templates, and from configuration in a Haskell-embedded domain-specific language. The author, Jasper Van der Jeugt, jaspervdj, provides a base-level setup (which I'm using so far). So long as you're happy with its overall structure, you can just slot in your content files, and regenerate with a simple command, not needing to touch any Haskell. If you're more ambitious, you can start editing templates and Haskell. Being text-based, it plays nice with version control. In fact, there's a tutorial on linking up neatly with Github pages. Like I said, Hakyll uses Pandoc, with all its goodness. I was originally planning to create content in raw HTML, but after seeing the conveniences of Pandoc's Markdown, I think I'll switch to it. As far as a creating and editing Markdown, I do it just direct in Emacs, and preview as I go along. I guess it'd be pretty simple to view with Pandoc, but Hakyll's driving that for me. Hakyll is worth looking at. Hope this helps. Oh, appropriate to this list: One question I'm tussling with is what licences to use. The original author doesn't say what licence his code and initial setup is under. Since it's on github, I assume it's some sort of free licence, but which one? And for my stuff, it's going to be a combination of writing, for which some sort of suitable Creative Commons licence would make sense (by "suitable" I mean GPL-like), and code, for which I'm thinking maybe Apache-2 would make most sense, since the amount of code will be pretty small, and maybe not worth the overhead of GPL. Any opinions? — Smiles, Les.
On 11/04/18 19:13, Les Kitchen wrote:
Oh, appropriate to this list: One question I'm tussling with is what licences to use. The original author doesn't say what licence his code and initial setup is under. Since it's on github, I assume it's some sort of free licence, but which one?
Hakyll is under a 3 clause BSD licence. https://github.com/jaspervdj/hakyll/blob/master/LICENSE
And for my stuff, it's going to be a combination of writing, for which some sort of suitable Creative Commons licence would make sense (by "suitable" I mean GPL-like), and code, for which I'm thinking maybe Apache-2 would make most sense, since the amount of code will be pretty small, and maybe not worth the overhead of GPL. Any opinions?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'overhead' of the GPL? If you plan to make source publicly available and reference/include the appropriate licence, then you've already there. The content on the site would be considered separate from the code, and would not be covered by the same copyright. Each article would be an original work, and you could use a licence such as CC BY-SA (which is perhaps the most GPL-like). regards, Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65
"Glenn" == Glenn McIntosh <neonsignal@meme.net.au> writes:
Glenn> The content on the site would be considered separate from the Glenn> code, and would not be covered by the same copyright. Each Glenn> article would be an original work, and you could use a Glenn> licence such as CC BY-SA (which is perhaps the most Glenn> GPL-like). For the benefit of others, and tell me if I'm telling you to suck eggs, copyright exists immediately is certain types of authored material. Both writing and code are considered literary works. The author of a work has certain rights concerning how it is used, displayed reproduced etc. Licensing is an agreement to waive some of those rights in certain ways, to let other people use the works. When copyright ends (life of the author + 70 years) the works enter the public domain. Once things have 'fallen' into the public domain other people can reuse them in pretty much anyway they wish. Personally I think it would be a good result if the public domain were a richer library of materials for all of us. This is where the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) library seems an exciting development. -- Sent with gnus
Hey all, I am going to add my 2 cents' worth. I think the editor is less important in this case, md markup is pretty simple in and of itself... that's the whole point of it, it's the rendering that counts. So really you can use any text editor (someone was suggesting emacs in this thread, you can even use vim.) I recently came across hugo and although, admittedly, I don't know too much about it, it seems pretty cool. It's got an Apache 2 license (see Apache License) and FSF has deemed the Apache 2.0 license to be compatible with GPL 3... had to look that up on Wikipedia which cites https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2 They do list markdown as one of their supported formats, see Supported Content Formats | | | | | | | | | | | Apache License Hugo v0.15 and later are released under the Apache 2.0 license. | | | ...and there seems to be a bit of a community around it. Let’s Encrypt use it... you may want to check it out. Greetings , Tatiana On Thursday, April 12, 2018, 8:45:26 AM GMT+10, David Maslen <list@maslen.id.au> wrote:
"Glenn" == Glenn McIntosh <neonsignal@meme.net.au> writes:
Glenn> The content on the site would be considered separate from the Glenn> code, and would not be covered by the same copyright. Each Glenn> article would be an original work, and you could use a Glenn> licence such as CC BY-SA (which is perhaps the most Glenn> GPL-like). For the benefit of others, and tell me if I'm telling you to suck eggs, copyright exists immediately is certain types of authored material. Both writing and code are considered literary works. The author of a work has certain rights concerning how it is used, displayed reproduced etc. Licensing is an agreement to waive some of those rights in certain ways, to let other people use the works. When copyright ends (life of the author + 70 years) the works enter the public domain. Once things have 'fallen' into the public domain other people can reuse them in pretty much anyway they wish. Personally I think it would be a good result if the public domain were a richer library of materials for all of us. This is where the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) library seems an exciting development. -- Sent with gnus _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au https://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-... Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
"Tatiana" == Tatiana Lenz <tlenz2006@yahoo.com> writes:
Tatiana> Hey all, I am going to add my 2 cents' worth. I think the Tatiana> editor is less important in this case, md markup is pretty Tatiana> simple in and of itself... that's the whole point of it, Tatiana> it's the rendering that counts. So really you can use any Tatiana> text editor (someone was suggesting emacs in this thread, Tatiana> you can even use vim.) I recently came across hugo and Tatiana> although, admittedly, I don't know too much about it, it Tatiana> seems pretty cool. I'm pretty firmly in the emacs camp, although I appreciate the vi key bindings. I think the learning curve for emacs makes it a significant commitment, but it's an 'art worth your learning'. So do use emacs. However, if I were in the market for a 'simple' and free[^2] text editor, I think I'd check out atom[^1]. Looks like plugins are written in node.js. Not a language I know much about, but a language taught to kids and probably one of the best languages to learn if you only learn one. -- Sent with gnus [^1]: https://atom.io/ [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)
Hi all, Sorry, maybe I made my point badly. I was basically trying to say which editor you use is not as important as the rendered markdown. I agree, Atom is a great editor. It's licensed under an MIT license. FSF warns you about an anti-feature (I love that term) though:- "Atom will by default send “anonymous” usage data to Google Analytics (operating system, Atom version, screen resolution, …). To change this, go to Preferences, and "Core" settings. Change "Send Telemetry data to the Atom Team" to No (Do not send any telemetry data)." See https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Interface/text I guess I should also use this opportunity to add that there are browser plugins for rendering markdown. I personally use a Chromium plugin, also with an MIT license, simply called "Markdown Viewer" https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-viewer/ckkdlimhmcjmikdlpk.... The project and documentation are on GitHub simov/markdown-viewer | | | | | | | | | | | simov/markdown-viewer markdown-viewer - Markdown Viewer / Browser Extension | | | ...but there are so many out there for Firefox and Chromium, just check the license (the plugins may have a different license to the browser you are using.) OK, I think that brings it up to 2 cents' worth now. Regards to all, Tatiana On Thursday, 12 April 2018, 7:32:02 pm AEST, David Maslen <list@maslen.id.au> wrote:
"Tatiana" == Tatiana Lenz <tlenz2006@yahoo.com> writes:
Tatiana> Hey all, I am going to add my 2 cents' worth. I think the Tatiana> editor is less important in this case, md markup is pretty Tatiana> simple in and of itself... that's the whole point of it, Tatiana> it's the rendering that counts. So really you can use any Tatiana> text editor (someone was suggesting emacs in this thread, Tatiana> you can even use vim.) I recently came across hugo and Tatiana> although, admittedly, I don't know too much about it, it Tatiana> seems pretty cool. I'm pretty firmly in the emacs camp, although I appreciate the vi key bindings. I think the learning curve for emacs makes it a significant commitment, but it's an 'art worth your learning'. So do use emacs. However, if I were in the market for a 'simple' and free[^2] text editor, I think I'd check out atom[^1]. Looks like plugins are written in node.js. Not a language I know much about, but a language taught to kids and probably one of the best languages to learn if you only learn one. -- Sent with gnus [^1]: https://atom.io/ [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)
P.S. Turns out the Markdown Viewer is now also a plugin for Firefox Markdown Viewer – Add-ons for Firefox | | | | Markdown Viewer – Add-ons for Firefox | | | On Friday, 13 April 2018, 5:11:42 pm AEST, Tatiana Lenz <tlenz2006@yahoo.com> wrote: Hi all, Sorry, maybe I made my point badly. I was basically trying to say which editor you use is not as important as the rendered markdown. I agree, Atom is a great editor. It's licensed under an MIT license. FSF warns you about an anti-feature (I love that term) though:- "Atom will by default send “anonymous” usage data to Google Analytics (operating system, Atom version, screen resolution, …). To change this, go to Preferences, and "Core" settings. Change "Send Telemetry data to the Atom Team" to No (Do not send any telemetry data)." See https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Interface/text I guess I should also use this opportunity to add that there are browser plugins for rendering markdown. I personally use a Chromium plugin, also with an MIT license, simply called "Markdown Viewer" https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-viewer/ckkdlimhmcjmikdlpk.... The project and documentation are on GitHub simov/markdown-viewer | | | | | | | | | | | simov/markdown-viewer markdown-viewer - Markdown Viewer / Browser Extension | | | ...but there are so many out there for Firefox and Chromium, just check the license (the plugins may have a different license to the browser you are using.) OK, I think that brings it up to 2 cents' worth now. Regards to all, Tatiana On Thursday, 12 April 2018, 7:32:02 pm AEST, David Maslen <list@maslen.id.au> wrote:
"Tatiana" == Tatiana Lenz <tlenz2006@yahoo.com> writes:
Tatiana> Hey all, I am going to add my 2 cents' worth. I think the Tatiana> editor is less important in this case, md markup is pretty Tatiana> simple in and of itself... that's the whole point of it, Tatiana> it's the rendering that counts. So really you can use any Tatiana> text editor (someone was suggesting emacs in this thread, Tatiana> you can even use vim.) I recently came across hugo and Tatiana> although, admittedly, I don't know too much about it, it Tatiana> seems pretty cool. I'm pretty firmly in the emacs camp, although I appreciate the vi key bindings. I think the learning curve for emacs makes it a significant commitment, but it's an 'art worth your learning'. So do use emacs. However, if I were in the market for a 'simple' and free[^2] text editor, I think I'd check out atom[^1]. Looks like plugins are written in node.js. Not a language I know much about, but a language taught to kids and probably one of the best languages to learn if you only learn one. -- Sent with gnus [^1]: https://atom.io/ [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)
What was the original poster asking for? Personally I don't see much value in https://github.com/simov/markdown-viewer, although I'm sure it must be valued by the author and others. For myself I use markdown on web pages, like forums, that allow for this simplified formatting. So how it renders is really a matter for the site in question. My formatting has to work for the lowest common denominator, the person who install no additional plugins. In this case emacs with the atomic chrome extension wins, as I can view any website, click in a text box, press the extension button and an emacs frame pops up and I can choose to type in either. If I choose emacs I can engage markdown mode. The extension is written for atom I think, but works with emacs also. If the original poster was just looking to write in markdown, so as to to later convert it to something else for publishing (via pandoc) I suppose that makes sense. I would use org mode and leave the markdown out of it. Perhaps the point of markdown is that it is so simple that you use a plain text editor, like whatever is bundled with your OS, and just manually code in your markdown. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/atomic-chrome/lhaoghhllmiaaagaffab... -- Sent with gnus
On Wed, Apr 11, 2018, at 23:46, Glenn McIntosh wrote:
Hakyll is under a 3 clause BSD licence. https://github.com/jaspervdj/hakyll/blob/master/LICENSE
Thanks, Glenn for finding that. I hadn't noticed it. I'd looked only at the top-level LICENSE file in the repo, which just had an author's copyright notice, no licence. (Sorry for slow response — I've been a bit out of action with some flu-y virussy malaise.)
And for my stuff, it's going to be a combination of writing, for which some sort of suitable Creative Commons licence would make sense (by "suitable" I mean GPL-like), and code, for which I'm thinking maybe Apache-2 would make most sense, since the amount of code will be pretty small, and maybe not worth the overhead of GPL. Any opinions?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'overhead' of the GPL? If you plan to make source publicly available and reference/include the appropriate licence, then you've already there.
Just quoting from the FSF's recommendations at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html: ... Now for the exceptions, where it is better to use some other licenses instead of the GNU GPL. Small programs It is not worth the trouble to use copyleft for most small programs. We use 300 lines as our benchmark: when a software package's source code is shorter than that, the benefits provided by copyleft are usually too small to justify the inconvenience of making sure a copy of the license always accompanies the software. For those programs, we recommend the Apache License 2.0. This is a pushover (non-copyleft) software license that has terms to prevent contributors and distributors from suing for patent infringement. This doesn't make the software immune to threats from patents (a software license can't do that), but it does prevent patent holders from setting up a “bait and switch” where they release the software under free terms then require recipients to agree to nonfree terms in a patent license. Among the lax pushover licenses, Apache 2.0 is best; so if you are going to use a lax pushover license, whatever the reason, we recommend using that one. ... In this context, you can also read https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html.
The content on the site would be considered separate from the code, and would not be covered by the same copyright. Each article would be an original work, and you could use a licence such as CC BY-SA (which is perhaps the most GPL-like).
Yeah, CC BY-SA was what I had in mind for content (just couldn't remember the formula). But there has been some later traffic about CC0... — Smiles, Les.
If it helps, my team's website is written using hakyll. http://qfpl.io/ Here is the source: https://github.com/qfpl/blog/ On 04/18/2018 06:15 PM, Les Kitchen wrote:
On Wed, Apr 11, 2018, at 23:46, Glenn McIntosh wrote:
Hakyll is under a 3 clause BSD licence. https://github.com/jaspervdj/hakyll/blob/master/LICENSE Thanks, Glenn for finding that. I hadn't noticed it. I'd looked only at the top-level LICENSE file in the repo, which just had an author's copyright notice, no licence.
(Sorry for slow response — I've been a bit out of action with some flu-y virussy malaise.)
And for my stuff, it's going to be a combination of writing, for which some sort of suitable Creative Commons licence would make sense (by "suitable" I mean GPL-like), and code, for which I'm thinking maybe Apache-2 would make most sense, since the amount of code will be pretty small, and maybe not worth the overhead of GPL. Any opinions? I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'overhead' of the GPL? If you plan to make source publicly available and reference/include the appropriate licence, then you've already there. Just quoting from the FSF's recommendations at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html:
... Now for the exceptions, where it is better to use some other licenses instead of the GNU GPL.
Small programs
It is not worth the trouble to use copyleft for most small programs. We use 300 lines as our benchmark: when a software package's source code is shorter than that, the benefits provided by copyleft are usually too small to justify the inconvenience of making sure a copy of the license always accompanies the software.
For those programs, we recommend the Apache License 2.0. This is a pushover (non-copyleft) software license that has terms to prevent contributors and distributors from suing for patent infringement. This doesn't make the software immune to threats from patents (a software license can't do that), but it does prevent patent holders from setting up a “bait and switch” where they release the software under free terms then require recipients to agree to nonfree terms in a patent license.
Among the lax pushover licenses, Apache 2.0 is best; so if you are going to use a lax pushover license, whatever the reason, we recommend using that one. ...
In this context, you can also read https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html.
The content on the site would be considered separate from the code, and would not be covered by the same copyright. Each article would be an original work, and you could use a licence such as CC BY-SA (which is perhaps the most GPL-like). Yeah, CC BY-SA was what I had in mind for content (just couldn't remember the formula). But there has been some later traffic about CC0...
— Smiles, Les. _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au https://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-...
Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
On 18/04/18 18:15, Les Kitchen wrote:
Just quoting from the FSF's recommendations at It is not worth the trouble to use copyleft for most small programs. We use 300 lines as our benchmark: when a software package's source code is shorter than that, the benefits provided by copyleft are usually too small to justify the inconvenience of making sure a copy of the license always accompanies the software.
I see what you mean then. It depends on how you were planning to distribute the code. To me the recommendations make the assumption that you are distributing your code as a collection of files (in which case, having a 200+ line copyright file for a tiny program might be less than pragmatic). Publishing code as part of a webpage or blog can be a bit different. For example, I notice that the FSF recommendations for the licence statement in Javascript files don't make use of the formula "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program", and instead suggest various ways of linking to the licence. Any way you do it, the two significant parts are (a) to have a copyright notice so it is clear who the copyright holder is, and (b) for it to be clear which specific licence the code is under (and where it can be found).
Yeah, CC BY-SA was what I had in mind for content (just couldn't remember the formula). But there has been some later traffic about CC0...
In my view the difference between these two free CC licences is philosophical, analogous to the difference between eg the Apache licence and the GPL licence. One issue is whether you care (as the creator) whether someone was to say modify your work and place it under a proprietary licence to the people they in turn distribute it to. And if you do care, whether you are willing to make use of a legal hack such as CC BY-SA to ensure that users further down the chain are not restricted in this way. Another issue to consider is attribution. In academia this is often handled in non-legal ways, because there is a strong community onus on crediting the source of material, and plagiarizing is penalized. Under the Australian copyright amendments in 2000 such rights were codified. But not all copyright codes legally require attribution of the source, and so many licences are explicit about this. CC0 relinquishes such legal rights (at least as far as it can). regards, Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65
participants (6)
-
Andrew Nesbit -
David Maslen -
Glenn McIntosh -
Les Kitchen -
Tatiana Lenz -
Tony Morris