I've tried to retrieve the wmd-editor source tarball lately, but the site seems offline. From what I've read on the Internet, wmd-editor is not (yet?) free software by itself, and its author has gone MIA. But it looks like somebody recently took the step to rewrite a wmd-clone under a saner license, see [[pagedown|http://code.google.com/p/pagedown/source/browse/]]. Given all the above, what about upgrading this plugin to use pagedown instead of wmd? It seem a clear win to me... > AFAICS, pagedown is a modified version of WMD. Let's > look at its license file: --[[Joey]]
A javascript port of Markdown, as used on Stack Overflow
and the rest of Stack Exchange network.

Largely based on showdown.js by John Fraser (Attacklab).

Original Markdown Copyright (c) 2004-2005 John Gruber
  


Original Showdown code copyright (c) 2007 John Fraser

Modifications and bugfixes (c) 2009 Dana Robinson
Modifications and bugfixes (c) 2009-2011 Stack Exchange Inc.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy [...]
> Ok, so it says it's based on showdown. John Fraser wrote showdown and also > WMD, which IIRC was built on top of showdown. (Showdown converts the > markdown to html, and WMD adds the editor UI.) > > I can nowhere find a actual statement of the copyright of showdown or > WMD. has a "MIT License" notice on it, > but this is clearly just the license chosen when signing up at google > code for the repo that would be used for a rewrite of the code, and the only thing > said about the previous 1.0 release of WMD is "use it freely", which is not > specific enough to be a grant of license, and is moreover not a free > software license, as it does not cover distribution or modification. > > Which was all covered in the thread here, > when StackOverflow decided to start working on pagedown. > > This thread does not give any indication that they ever managed to get > a license grant for WMD/showdown. It frankly, does not inspire confidence > that the people working on this care about the license. > > It would probably be pretty easy to adapt the ikiwiki wmd plugin > to use pagedown. But without a clear and credible license, why? > > (Note that I have a wmd-new branch in my ikiwiki git repo that > uses , which was an earlier > version of pagedown (probably, not entirely clear).) > > An alternate alternative is markitup: > It has a clear history and a credible license (MIT or GPL dual license). > It's also easily extensible to other formats so could handle rst etc. > It does not, however, have a markdown to html converter -- for > previewing it has to talk to the server with AJAX. > --[[Joey]]