Help Wanted - Looking for maintainers

[delambo]

All -

I haven't worked on a project that has used ice in well over three years which has made it hard to maintain this library. I'm very close to marking this project as deprecated/abandoned.

I had a good talk with @itmilos about resurrecting ice but we would need a good group of maintainers that are actively using ice in production and have a good track record with open source before that could work. From now on, I'll be watching the project closely for comments and pull requests. If you have any interest, leave some comments on old pull requests and issues (suggest a reject/accept or re-engage with old committers), submit your own pull requests, or wipe off some of the dust on this old code. With enough activity, I can convince my org to give you write permission on the repository.

I'd like to see ice live on. I look forward to working with you all.

-Matt

[johanneswilm]

Hey, sorry to hear that. We have switched from ICE/contenteditable to using a a framework for collaborative editing, prosemirror. I see that there is also a New York Times person working on that, @ericandrewlewis , so I wonder if there are plans of moving to that kind of framework for you guys.

So unfortunately we will not be submitting more patches to ICE. However, last I checked, the CKEditor tracked changes plugin was built on top of ICE, and the ICE version they included seems to be maintained. At least we could pull it out and it worked with modern browsers. Maybe they would be interested in taking over maintainership?

[catsgotmytongue]

Well I had worked on tinymce ice a few years ago and I often thought it
needs to be rewritten from scratch for newer browsers. I was thinking of
building my own in typescript.
On Mar 14, 2016 8:09 AM, "Johannes Wilm" [email protected] wrote:

Hey, sorry to hear that. We have switched from ICE/contenteditable to
using a a framework for collaborative editing, prosemirror. I see that
there is also a New York Times person working on that, @ericandrewlewis
https://github.com/ericandrewlewis , so I wonder if there are plans of
moving to that kind of framework for you guys.

So unfortunately we will not be submitting more patches to ICE. However,
last I checked, the CKEditor tracked changes plugin was built on top of
ICE, and the ICE version they included seems to be maintained. At least we
could pull it out and it worked with modern browsers. Maybe they would be
interested in taking over maintainership?

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[johanneswilm]

@catsgotmytongue ICE, the way it is done on top of contenteditable, will always have the issue that it will have to be changed and adjusted. This is because contenteditable is NOT specced and the different browsers change it around from version to version. It doesn't matter whether you use TypeScript or CoffeeScript, this issue won't go away before contenteditable is fully specced. So far, the browser makers seem not to think this is realistic in the next 20 years.

The alternative is to try to build a framework on top (such as upcomming versions of CKeditor, Ckeditor, prosemirror) which reimplement every editing operation themselves in JavaScript.

[catsgotmytongue]

I was more thinking it would be easier to maintain and refactor in
typescript. JavaScript is a pain to maintain.
On Mar 14, 2016 12:51 PM, "Johannes Wilm" [email protected] wrote:

@catsgotmytongue https://github.com/catsgotmytongue ICE, the way it is
done on top of contenteditable, will always have the issue that it will
have to be changed and adjusted. This is because contenteditable is NOT
specced and the different browsers change it around from version to
version. It doesn't matter whether you use TypeScript or CoffeeScript, this
issue won't go away before contenteditable is fully specced. So far, the
browser makers seem not to think this is realistic in the next 20 years.

The alternative is to try to build a framework on top (such as upcomming
versions of CKeditor, Ckeditor, prosemirror) which reimplement every
editing operation themselves in JavaScript.

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#126 (comment).

[jaskiewiczm]

I may have a change that I would like to contribute. How would I go about doing that? Cut/paste via the right-click context menu.

[androb]

My company Ephox took on the TinyMCE project last year and we may be able to take on ICE at some point. We probably have some challenges with the GPL license though (we have a range of commercial software vendors we license our technology to.) If ICE could be changed to MIT or Apache license there is good potential for us to get involved.

[johanneswilm]

Changing it from GPL to MIT would basically mean that you guys can use it for whatever.

I think it would be difficult to find have all the original developers sign over the license. But if you offer the right amount of money, I'd do it for my contributions.

[androb]

Understood. It is a bit of a blocker for us to invest much in ICE though. We often "OEM" our technology into third party commercial systems and need the ability to dual-license the technology. We have a pretty full roadmap right now but track changes type functionality is definitely out there in the medium term.

My comments are nothing against GPL - we do a lot of work with WordPress for example - it is just the constraints of our business model :)

[johanneswilm]

Nono. But you are a commercial business and you would like to have the option to advance this library under a nonfree license to your costumers. If it were up to me, I'd give you that option, as long as you pay us as well. Why should you be making money of our work?

That being said, I don't think ICE is really a viable solution in 2016. You really need something with a data model apart from the DOM to make this work right.

[androb]

Yes, understood @johanneswilm .

I am sure ICE could benefit from some more commercial backing/funding, and I was saying that for us I don't think it would work as long as it is licensed under GPL. It might be totally fine for other companies (like the NYT did originally). Regardless, it is a bit hypothetical we aren't in a position to look at it just yet and as you said there might be better technical directions in 2016.

[ericandrewlewis]

👋 Johannes and Andrew

you are a commercial business and you would like to have the option to advance this library under a nonfree license to your costumers. If it were up to me, I'd give you that option, as long as you pay us as well. Why should you be making money of our work?

The MIT license is a free (as in freedom) software license according to GNU/Free Software Foundation, although they consider it a lax one. Anyone can sell free (as in freedom) software licensed under the GPL or the MIT license. Would you like WordPress? I will give it to you cheap, say $20 😉

I would guess a business's interest in dual licensing when say building custom add-ons is benefitting from the laxness of the MIT license rather than the GPL. The GPL has stipulations about distribution which makes doing for-profit work in private on top of the GPL more complex.

Sorry to continue an off-topic conversation 😄

[johanneswilm]

Hey, @ericandrewlewis, I think we are all aware of the differences between the licenses. GPL forces to distribute changes if one distributes the derived version, MIT doesn't. That's why in effect @androb is asking for it to be gifted to them.

@androb You are effectively saying "If you give us the ICE sourcecode as a gift, we might consider giving something back to the free version" -- but the license no longer requires you to do that.

I am sure it is a business decision for ephox whether or not you have a track changes feature as part of the software bundle you offer, and whether or not that feature is part of your open source offering or not. Either your costumers want it, and pay for it in which case you'll program it or modify ICE, or they don't and you won't do any of that. So it's not like you would possibly start maintaining ICE simply as a gift to the ICE-developer community.

We don't have to harp on this, but the request seems slightly out of place. How do you think the rest of us eat? We also buy most of our food with money, and the time we spent on programming ICE and other projects is what gives us that money, Participating in a GPL-project was a conscious choice and it's not the same contributing to an MIT-licensed project.

So if the GPL is not for you: That's fine. You can try to buy off the programmers. However, I predict this to be somewhat difficult.

[androb]

Oops didn't mean to create a storm. 😁

I'm familiar with all the licences - we have donated/sponsored products
under LGPL (TinyMCE) and GPL (Plupload) and use lots of MIT/Apache
components . It works for a lot of users and not for some others.

GPL doesn't work for us for components we might embed not because of our
own needs but rather our end customers like SAP or IBM. It's their policies
not ours that make it hard.

My only point is that if ICE is needing development work changing the
license might help attract some interest from companies like Ephox. Of
course all the copyright owners would need to agree so it is highly
unlikely to happen.

Sticking with GPL doesn't rule out our envolvement. It would actually work
for a lot of our customers. It just makes it harder and less likely that's
all.

As the major sponsors of TinyMCE we are keen to evolve it and add-ins for
it to better support collaboration features like track changes. Thank you
for indulging me with a little dialog about it :)
On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 5:05 PM, Johannes Wilm [email protected]
wrote:

Hey, @ericandrewlewis https://github.com/ericandrewlewis, I think we
are all aware of the differences between the licenses. GPL forces to
distribute changes if one distributes the derived version, MIT doesn't.
That's why in effect @androb https://github.com/androb is asking for it
to be gifted to them.

@androb https://github.com/androb You are effectively saying "If you
give us the ICE sourcecode as a gift, we might consider giving something
back to the free version" -- but the license no longer requires you to do
that.

I am sure it is a business decision for ephox whether or not you have a
track changes feature as part of the software bundle you offer, and whether
or not that feature is part of your open source offering or not. Either
your costumers want it, and pay for it in which case you'll program it or
modify ICE, or they don't and you won't do any of that. So it's not like
you would possibly start maintaining ICE simply as a gift to the
ICE-developer community.

We don't have to harp on this, but the request seems slightly out of
place. How do you think the rest of us eat? We also buy most of our food
with money, and the time we spent on programming ICE and other projects is
what gives us that money, Participating in a GPL-project was a conscious
choice and it's not the same contributing to an MIT-licensed project.

So if the GPL is not for you: That's fine. You can try to buy off the
programmers. However, I predict this to be somewhat difficult.

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[Lyanra]

Please have a look at this update request #112
It would be very appreciated if you could update your license to GPLv3 (or still better LGPL)

Best regards!

[slashinjection]

So ICE is abandoned it seems. Is there a successor? Looking for similar functionality to use with Tinymce.

[delambo]

@slashinjection - ice is not abandoned, but it hasn't been maintained for a while. I'm still looking for a good maintainer to take over.

[slashinjection]

@delambo Hi Matthew, thanks for your reply. I may be using ice for a project and if that is the case will see if I can contribute to the maintenance. Thanks again.