Weekly update – 16 August 2024

[ryan]

I was able to speak with someone at TinyMCE on a Zoom call this week and we had a good  meeting. They are going to make it possible for us to continue using TinyMCE 7.x+ in the core, even though it is using a GPL license, while we use the MPL 2.x license. They will make a custom license available for ProcessWire and I hope to have the details of that potentially next week. We’ll have to review the conditions and everything to make all is good, but it sounds like it will very likely solve the issue for us. I’m really happy about this and look forward to working with TinyMCE 7.x 

They also expressed interest in us potentially collaborating on a separate module that would make some of the commercial and advanced TinyMCE features available to ProcessWire users that wanted them via a paid service, like a Pro module. This option hasn't been available to us before, so I thought it sounded interesting. I'll definitely be communicating with them more about that to see what's possible. That’s all I know so far, but will keep you up-to-date as I learn more. 
 

[wbmnfktr]

That sounds great.

Would it be the cloud-hosted version of TinyMCE then we would have in ProcessWire?

If so GDPR could become a new issue and topic.

[szabesz]

9 hours ago, ryan said:

They also expressed interest in us potentially collaborating on a separate module that would make some of the commercial and advanced TinyMCE features available to ProcessWire users that wanted them via a paid service, like a Pro module.

I would certainly be interested in that. After all, the developers of TinyMCE need to make a living from it as well, so a well-balanced win-win situation would be welcome.

[mattgs]

On 8/16/2024 at 11:03 PM, wbmnfktr said:

That sounds great.

Would it be the cloud-hosted version of TinyMCE then we would have in ProcessWire?

If so GDPR could become a new issue and topic.

A cloud-hosted version would indeed be troublesome in terms of GDPR. As almost all of my clients are based in Europe, this is a crucial and sensitive topic to me. It's a bit frustrating how the licensing problem with rich text editors just keeps repeating itself. First CKEditor, now TinyMCE. That said, I need to emphasize that it's not about "wanting things for free". If the solution is a paid module, I'm perfectly fine with that. I just wish there would be a long-term solution to this problem that wouldn't involve Ryan having to negotiate licenses every two years or so.

[ryan]

We couldn't use a cloud version for the core of course. TinyMCE 7.x version would be bundled in InputfieldTinyMCE the same way the current one is. It may be that the cloud version is used for the Pro module though (if that is built), as I think that's how the company distributes their commercial version, but I don't really know. I'll be sure to ask more about it when the time comes. 

Interestingly, the person I talked to seemed to be involved with both CKEditor and TinyMCE. It appears they are now owned by the same company: https://www.tiugotech.com/tools/

[mattgs]

Mh, an investment company gobbling up open source projects. Yeah, that's never a good sign. I think we need an RTE that's governed by the OSI or something.