In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained.
Typst appears to be a mix of open source and closed source; the general model here tends to be neglecting the open source part and implementing critical features in the closed source portion. Which is to say, it's unlikely to live beyond the company itself.
Typst is fully open source licensed under Apache-2.0 license. It is not a mix of any kind. Don't confuse the web app with Typst engine. The web app is a similar service to Overleaf and that is closed source. It is not mandatory, you can use Typst fully on your local machine. The team tries to make money and cover development costs with the web app. But the actual typesetting engine is fully open source and free.
Yep. I wrote an academic paper a few months ago in Typst. I used the VS Code extension for live previewing. All totally opensource and it works great.
https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf hm ?
The Typst web app, which is similar to Overleaf, is closed source. Overleaf itself is open source, yes.
Overleaf isn't fully open source either, since they have a paid tier with features which are not present in this repo. Inline commenting for example, is a Server Pro -only feature.
Read your own link before posting. While the parent was wrong about it being fully closed source the Overleaf editor isn't fully open source either, it is open core under AGPL.
> If you want help installing and maintaining Overleaf in your lab or workplace, we offer an officially supported version called Overleaf Server Pro. It also includes more features for security (SSO with LDAP or SAML), administration and collaboration (e.g. tracked changes). Find out more!
"That" in my sentence meant that Typst web app is closed source.
But that doesn’t make much sense - by your account Latex would also be a mix of closed and open source, since closed source web apps exists for writing Latex.
What does not make sense? Did you mean to answer to someone else? I only stated that Typst (the typesetting engine) is free to use and modify, and only the web app is closed source. Typst can be used without touching any web apps. I use Typst locally.
I made no claims about any mixes or claims about LaTeX.
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you are wrong. typst's lead dev has stated that an important goal is to have the CLI (which is open source) and web app behave identically, even refusing to implement such a basic feature as PDF embedding because, due to technical reasons, it is currently incompatible with this goal. [1]
typst, the project, is not by any means a "mix" of open and closed, even if typst, the company, is. indeed, the most thorough LSP implementation available (tinymist) is not only open source but a community project. for another funny example see typstify, a paid typst editor not affiliated with the company. [2]
[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145#issuecomment-17531...
[2]: https://typstify.com/purchase/
I believe their intentions are good, and keeping functionality the same for different outputs to avoid fragmentation is good too. An alternative interpretation, however, directly in line with the fear expressed by GP, is that they're already crippling the open source CLI because they can't support the feature in the closed source web app.
I disagree. The web app editor is closed source, but much of what it provides is open source so editing is a similar (and imo better) experience locally. The typst compiler and LSP and everything you need to use it is open source.
Imo the situation is more like if overleaf were also the people who made the LaTeX project originally.
I think the only possible issue with the typst org dying (assuming after the full 1.0 version so it's mostly maintenance) is that packages are automatically downloaded from the typst site, but an open repo can trivially be made considering that the set of packages used is just from a open source git repo and the closed source site just hosts tar.gz files of the folders in the repo. Not a big deal I think.
They have a deep incentive to drive users to subscribe, and that's directly at odds with keeping all of the document rendering open source. It makes a lot of sense for them to provide document features that are only available to subscribers.
What you suggest seems plausible, but there is a very good counter example. Overleaf is also managing well by relying on the open-source LaTEX. What drives people to subscribe is not the typesetting itself, but the ecosystem around it (collaborative editing, version management, easy sharing, etc.). You can make money with those and still have the rendering free/open-source. I believe a similar thing is/will be true for Typst as well.
That is a bad counterexample. There is a world of difference between the main devs offering a paid service and some unaffiliated company offering services.
In principle, having a reliable source of funding for typst is great. However, as a journal this would make me hesitant: what if down the road some essential features become subscription-only?
It helps that the LaTeX ecosystem is such a flaming dumpster fire that you all but need a tool like OverLeaf to use it effectively.
They have some incentive to drive users to subscribe, but they have other forms of income, and I think if they ever implemented even a single feature of actual rendering that was closed source their community would riot and we'd get a community managed fork (probably by the guy who does the language server...).
The only way they can continue to gain traction is if they never ever in any way lock people to the web app. Documents must be portable, it's part of why someone would want typst anyways.
I do not see a future where this happens, and if it does it will be because the typst org has changed hands and is also no longer particularly relevant to the future of typst the language.
Is there really a community of volunteer contributors that could fork it if that happened? Typically with a corporate-backed project like this, the corporate development tends to crowd out the formation of a volunteer community of contributors that would be able to take over development.
All the typesetting extensions and such are a community effort. There are so many specific use cases that can only be/will be done by very specialized academics that a non-networked product would die on the vine.
There is quite a clear distinction/border between an Input-Output rendering kind of program sitting beneath everything, and a web service providing stuff like collaborative editing, free hosting etc on top.
That is a real concern, but I wouldn't say there are any critical features in the closed source portion. I wrote the whole thesis locally with only open source tools. One of the included papers was written in the cloud platform for collaboration.
It is a concern that there is a single company doing most of the development, but there is quite a bit of community involvement so I don't think it is an immediate concern
>In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained.
The latter is a genuine concern. Will it be maintained? I like LaTeX a lot, but would I want to maintain its internals? No. Could I? If I were paid handsomely, yes. Emphasis on handsomely.
Which leads to another worry: LaTeX itself may be OSS, but down the line it is possible that maintained forks will be controlled by big publishers paying maintainers to deal with the insanity of its internals. And we all know how lovely those publishers are (凸ಠ益ಠ)凸
TeX Live started in 1996, current update release is March, and has active conferences next year. They're an open source group, that has so far survived the test of time, and I'd suggest motivations are there to keep that into the distant future.
Unless academia collapses.
I hope you are correct!
> implementing critical features in the closed source portion
Like which critical features, for example?
For now, that's the entire collaboration component. It would make sense to build a portion of document rendering in that context which won't be found in the open source portions. A value-add to convince users to subscribe.
>For now, that's the entire collaboration component.
And LaTeX has this for free? It's separated concerns, I think the analogy is Overleaf and LaTeX but just happened to be made by the same group of folks, it doesn't have to go down the monetization-at-the-cost-of-your-user route.
> And LaTeX has this for free?
Yes, Overleaf is both free-as-in-beer [0] and free-as-in-speech [1]. The OSS version is pretty easy to self-host, but it's missing quite a few features from the paid version. I still prefer compiling from the command-line for most of my documents, but I run the self-hosted version for collaboration.
[0] https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans
[1] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf/
The free plan on overleaf only allows collaboration between 2 people. If you have 3 students in your report assignment then you can't use overleaf for free.
That sounds like a sign that overleaf is struggling, that they had to make that change.
And Typst is more generous there, you can collaborate 3 people with no problem.
> The free plan on overleaf only allows collaboration between 2 people. If you have 3 students in your report assignment then you can't use overleaf for free.
Yup. You used to be able to share projects with unlimited people via link sharing, but they annoyingly got rid of that last year [0]. And Overleaf's cheapest plan is still more expensive than a basic VPS, so it's actually cheaper to self-host (which is what I'm doing [1]).
> That sounds like a sign that overleaf is struggling, that they had to make that change.
Either struggling or realized that they have a captive audience—if your professor requires assignments to be typeset with LaTeX and assigns group projects, there aren't really any other options.
[0] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/changes-to-project-sharing
[1] https://www.maxchernoff.ca/p/overleaf
Actually I've never understood the "free-as-in-beer" thing. Where is beer free?
The term was arguably coined by RMS and his full statement was:
> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Sometimes beer happens to be free, in which case it is referred to as "free beer". It's just an example.
I've always understood "free as in beer" as: if someone hands you a beer and says it's free, you know that you don't have to pay to consume the beer, but that doesn't mean that you also get the recipe, brewing instructions, factory plans, glass making instructions etc. The only thing that is free is the liquid itself, nothing else.
Lots of occasions, mostly celebrations or campaigns. It even has its own Wikipedia article:
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freibier
often when you are with friends
i mean that's what overleaf does with latex too, so i don't see the difference
Overleaf is open source.
It is open core.
> neglecting the open source part
So it's no different than fully open sourced projects.
On the flip side, new tools like Typst are trying to push the UX forward in ways that the LaTeX ecosystem often struggles with. I think it comes down to what risks you're comfortable with
Does that matter? The article is in PDF, as other latex generated PDFs.
Yes, obviously. Do you delete all source code once you compiled a binary?
Any future corrections, additions or other modifications are made to the source, not the generated old pdf.
LaTeX is not as stable as people make it out to be.
I don't know how many packages there are for working with tables, but 20 years ago, `tabu` was the most recommended package, until the maintainer stopped responding. Now the package is incompatible with almost everything else, leading to headaches when trying to compile old documents:
https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/470107/incompatibili...
Typst at least has dependency pinning out of the box. If you value reproducibility, you should invent a similar mechanism for your LaTeX documents.
Also, I'm loosely following the activities around LaTeX on Github and Stackexchange and it seems that it's mostly maintained by three people or so (Carlisle, Mittelbach, Fischer), who - no offense - aren't getting any younger. I wonder how well LaTeX will be maintained if these long time contributors have to step down eventually.