[Athen] Fw: ShareLaTeX is now open source!

[Lisa Brandt]

FYI, LaTeX fans. :-)
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Lisa Brandt, PCC Disability Services
Accessibility Technician
Alternate Media Formats Technician
971-722-4366



------ Forwarded Message ------
From: "Henry Oswald" <team at sharelatex.com>
Sent: 2/21/2014 4:21:50 AM
Subject: ShareLaTeX is now open source!

Hi Lisa,

We're pleased to announce that ShareLaTeX is now open source, and you 
can grab the code on Github! ShareLaTeX is a web-based real-time 
collaborative LaTeX editor, and you can now run your own local version 
where you can host, edit, share and compile your LaTeX documents. We're 
still 100% focused on running the hosted version at 
http://www.sharelatex.com, but we want to be more flexible in how you 
can use ShareLaTeX, and give something back to our wonderful community.


We're starting by open-sourcing the core parts of ShareLaTeX, including 
the editor, the project and document storage systems, and the backend 
LaTeX compiler that we use. This is only the beginning of our 
open-source journey though, and we will be open sourcing much more soon. 
(We still need to review our back-end code and write documentation for 
the other parts.)

Motivation
Our main motivation for ShareLaTeX has always been to improve the 
efficiency of scientists and students around the world. Open sourcing 
our code base is a natural way to make sure that we can help as many 
people as possible.

As a small team, we're constantly receiving feature requests that we'd 
love to implement but don't have the time. We've also had a lot of 
offers from willing volunteers who we've had to turn away because we 
didn't have a framework for people to contribute. We hope that by 
open-sourcing ShareLaTeX we can empower our brilliant community to help 
improve ShareLaTeX in the ways that you want, without having to wait for 
the two of us to work down our todo list.

A lot of people have asked to host ShareLaTeX internally due to company 
guidelines or data privacy concerns. We don't have the resources to 
support licensed installs at the moment, but we also hate having to say 
no. With an open-source version of ShareLaTeX, now anyone who wants to 
run it locally can.

We are still continuing to work on ShareLaTeX full time, and we expect 
that the time we have to work on new features will only increase in the 
coming year. (We are starting to look for a front end developer/designer 
to join our distributed team. If that sounds interesting then please get 
in touch at team at sharelatex.com.)

Contributing
If you run into any problems with downloading and setting up ShareLaTeX, 
please let us know on our issue page.

ShareLaTeX is written in CoffeeScript (and occasionally JavaScript), and 
our back-end runs on Node.js. Regardless of your experience, we would 
love to help you get to know the ShareLaTeX code base, and help you 
contribute your first patch. The code can be found on Github, and an 
overview of all open issues can be found here. We've got some issues 
marked as 'good for beginners', but don't let that constrain you! We 
also have an open chat room for discussing development. Please drop in 
if you have any questions, or just say hi.

There are also ways to help that aren't all about coding. The whole site 
could do with the caring touch of a designer, or if you speak a language 
other than English, then you could help to translate ShareLaTeX. There 
is LaTeX documentation that needs improving, and we're always keen for 
bug reports from anyone using the site.

If you would like to discuss this news please head over to our 
announcement blog post.

Regards,
Henry and James
ShareLaTeX Co-founders
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