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Absolutely true, and although I did pay for Overleaf at first, I stopped paying when I realized I didn't need the for-pay features anyhow. They made a consciou

by apathy 10y ago

Absolutely true, and although I did pay for Overleaf at first, I stopped paying when I realized I didn't need the for-pay features anyhow. They made a conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK with that -- Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and when I was there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too. https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source#.WBZSuhIrKkA https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source#.WB... An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does. LaTeX itself is, and anything you're working on within Overleaf can be exported as text at any time, so I don't worry so much about lock-in. The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going anywhere; I have supported the LyX project in the past, and indeed that's how I laid out my dissertation, but in the end I find Overleaf more usable. I still wish they'd support Markdown, though. Sometimes I just want to run off a quick, properly typeset series of equations and lists/tables without all the boilerplate. I suppose you could make the argument "well, if it was OSS, you could just patch it yourself!", and you wouldn't be wrong. But we use the autosubmit feature a lot, so on balance I've decided I can live with this shortcoming.

jdleesmiller 10y ago
(Overleaf co-founder here.) Re markdown, we don't officially support it, but it is possible to write markdown in LaTeX: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/using-markdown-in-latex-documents/whdrnpcpnwrm https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/using-markdown-in-la... Pretty neat!
cyphar 10y ago
> They made a conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK with that -- Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and when I was there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too. Focusing on internal development is not a justification for making software proprietary. A software license has nothing to do with development style -- you could do code dumps like Oracle while also licensing the code under a free software license. > An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does. I disagree. All businesses will die eventually (or at least, almost all of them will). The difference between a proprietary business and a free software business is that only one of them actually makes a lasting contribution to society in terms of software (hint: it's not the proprietary one). > The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going anywhere; True, and even more of a reason to prefer free software solutions (a proprietary version of LaTeX and packages wouldn't have survived for as long as LaTeX has). But, each to their own.

by apathy 10y ago

jdleesmiller 10y ago

(Overleaf co-founder here.) Re markdown, we don't officially support it, but it is possible to write markdown in LaTeX: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/using-markdown-in-latex-documents/whdrnpcpnwrm https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/using-markdown-in-la... Pretty neat!

cyphar 10y ago

> They made a conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK with that -- Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and when I was there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too. Focusing on internal development is not a justification for making software proprietary. A software license has nothing to do with development style -- you could do code dumps like Oracle while also licensing the code under a free software license. > An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does. I disagree. All businesses will die eventually (or at least, almost all of them will). The difference between a proprietary business and a free software business is that only one of them actually makes a lasting contribution to society in terms of software (hint: it's not the proprietary one). > The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going anywhere; True, and even more of a reason to prefer free software solutions (a proprietary version of LaTeX and packages wouldn't have survived for as long as LaTeX has). But, each to their own.