[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Erik Moeller]

2010/11/12 Joe Corneli <holtzermann17 at gmail.com>:
> I'm just saying the reason to kvetch about Pediapress is not that they
> produce books or that they are a company that makes money.  The more
> serious complaint is that they are presently have monopoly status, and
> that this monopoly is mostly made possible because there is no
> free/open source toolchain that does what they offer.

What's open:
- the Collection extension
- the MediaWiki parser (mwlib)
- export support for PDF (via ReportLab), ODT, DocBook, XHTML at
different states of completeness; PDF being the only one I would
characterize as mature
- a few helper tools

(All the code used on WMF servers plus some code not currently used by us.)

Available via:
http://code.pediapress.com/git/

What's proprietary:
- the LaTeX export used by PediaPress.com for rendering printed books
- all aspects of the PediaPress.com web service

I'd love for the LaTeX export to be made available as open source as
well. Heiko and I have talked a few times about this -- obviously it's
understandable why they prefer to at least keep some "secret sauce".
Policy-wise, what's key to us is that everything running on the WMF
side is open, but it'd be in the spirit of the partnership to make the
full toolchain open source (ideally without killing a tiny company
that's done all the work in favor of a bigger one benefiting from it).

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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