Re: Concrete suggestions to improve Org mode third-party integration :: an afterthought following Karl Voit's Orgdown proposal

[Tim Cross]

Juan Manuel Macías <maciaschain@posteo.net> writes:

> Ihor Radchenko writes:
>
>> The website title is "Org mode for Emacs", repelling users who _do
>>    not want_ to use Org inside Emacs. Maybe we can do better? Something
>>    with less accent on Emacs like "Org mode: your life in plain text"
>
> I am not at all in favor of separating the 'Org Mode' name from 'GNU Emacs'.
> In any case, regardless of my opinion, I see here two problems:
>
> 1. "Org mode: your life in plain text". The word "mode" remains orphan:
> mode of what? It is clear that it is an Emacs mode, therefore it doesn't
> make much sense to hide Emacs and then suggest it.
>
> 2. One possibility: "Org: your life in plain text". But here what
> remains orphaned is "Org", too generic name. Unless "Org Mode" is a
> lexicalized construct, without reference to any emacs mode.
>
> (In any case, I would be extremely saddened if the reference to GNU Emacs
> disappears in the title, just to please a minority).
>

There is another big issue which people are not considering.

Org mode is a GNU project and it is part of Emacs. This actually has
some consequences, most notably -

- It is not acceptable for the project to explicitly or implicitly
  recommend or appear to recommend any non-free solutions or provide
  support for non-free software. Products like Github and MS Visual Code
  fall squarely in the unacceptable bucket.

- It would not be possible to reference any 3rd party libraries or
  programs which are not free software in the proposed list of external
  tools

- The suggested org mode in a browser example is unlikely to be
  acceptable to the FSF (or RMS). The FSF is very much against cloud
  based computing services or any web service which uses non-free
  Javascript (which is most of them and one of the many reasons Github
  is discouraged by the FSF).

A number of the ideas proposed are good ideas for org mode generally -
for example, a repository of reference documents which could be used for
testing purposes would be extremely useful for org-mode development and
testing. Likewise, any effort to clarify the syntax and remove any
ambiguities is beneficial for org mode itself. However, the emphasis and
priority needs to remain focused on org mode as a mode for Emacs. The
use of org mode by other external programs is really outside (but
related) to the project.

As a consequence and to eliminate/remove potential conflicts with FSF
philosophy and goals, it may be worth considering spinning off a
separate project. which happens to use the same markup syntax, but is
not a GNU project (though it would be good to still be GPL'd). 

If you want ot get a feel for the sort of issues which could come up
when trying to develop/support 3rd party tools, have a look at the
recent thread on creating an LSP server for emacs-lisp. While I
personally disagree with most of the fears raised by some contributors
to that thread and disagree with RMS's view that such a server would not
be in the best interests of Emacs, the thread does give you a sample of
the sort of issues which could come up with efforts to support or
encourage 3rd party libraries for org markup, much of which could be
avoided if the work is clearly not part of, related to or supported by
the main org-mode project.