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by Alan Williamson.
Original Post: Should Atlassian contribute back to Radeox?
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As readers of this blog will know I have been using the Radeox library now for working with WIKI markup. I like the direction this library is heading, attempting to standardise on the WIKI markup to make it easier to have one common language we can all agree on.Â
Radeox list on their site, Atlassian's Confluence product. If you look at the Confluence help screen for their markup you'll notice its pretty much the same as Radeox with a number of additions. But Atlassian haven't contributed their additions back to the Radeox library. Why not?
Additions are good and should be encouraged. My only concern is that since this was an open source library in the first place, and irrespective of what the license of that library says you can or can't do, the whole purpose of the library was to attempt to standardise on a WIKI markup, not give people a jumping point to start their own WIKI markup implementations.
Yes one can argue that's business. Why shouldn't they utilise open-source projects for their own gains? No reason whatsoever. But Atlassian do a lot for the open source community already so they are already in the mind set of why certain things are open source and why certain libraries are not. Standardising on a WIKI format makes it easier for users to migrate across different systems, bringing with them the knowledge that what they have learnt will come with them.
For my project I am working on an XSLT file that takes XHTML and transform it to WIKI markup. This file once completed will be happily made available to anyone that wants it, can improve on it, and use it. I don't want my users to have to worry about the syntax for a numbered-list. Or how can one embed code inside lists etc.
Let us the developers worry about the 'hard stuff' and let our users, the general populace, worry about as little as possible. WIKI markup is convenient for developers; it makes our lives easier as we can forget about nasty HTML that can creep in and destroy a page or install a virus via Javascript. We are in control but still give the user to express themselves via formatting directives. It is also much easier from the users perspective, once they know a few basic rules they'll find themselves contributing far more in far less time.
But the whole premise assumes that WIKI Markup is standardised. Which at the moment it is not.
This is why I give a thumbs up to libraries like Radeox and a thumbs down to users like Atlassian that have missed the whole reason for using Radeox in the first place.
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