It took about a year and a half of private development to get here, but when we started Orient, we said that eventually TeXposit would be open source.
In the early days, often the architecture changes every other week, and you end up having to explain to contributors why their work no longer merges automatically instead of building the foundations. We chose to focus on the foundations: the editor, real-time collaboration, the AI assistant, provenance tracking, security, accessibility. They are stable enough now that we can hand them to you, so TeXposit will be released under the GNU AGPL-3.0, together with a free community edition that you can run yourself. We want this CE to be as useful as possible, without arbitrary limitations or feature omissions compared to the enterprise edition.
The mission is the same as when we started. We are building a human-first, high utility collaborative writing workspace where it stays clear who wrote what. We believe in transparency, and responsible human-AI co-authorship, not detection.
Looking for FOSS enthusiasts, representatives and power users
Putting a repository on GitHub is easy, but making it a reputable project people want to contribute to takes more. Before the public launch, we are recruiting a few FOSS enthusiasts to get early access to the repository.
We would like your help with making sure that TeXposit and Orient follow good FOSS conduct: the code, the repository, our development processes, how we handle contributions and the community. We also want this community edition to be easy to install and use for non-technical users who just want to get started with their work.
You do not need to be an expert. Any experience with contributing to open source projects, the perspective of a power user of collaborative workspaces or wishes of laboratory heads would be also welcome. In return, with your permission, we can offer you credit in the first public release.
We will take applications for the next two to three weeks, but are keeping the group small on purpose, so that we can act on all the input. Currently, we are aiming to open the repository to the public in mid to late November (at https://github.com/orient-labs/texposit, once public), depending on how much work the early reviewers find for us.
If you are interested, please write to [email protected] with a few words about background and what you would most like to review/audit before the launch. We will reply to everyone.
Background illustration: Engelbert Kaempfer, Amoenitatum Exoticarum (Lemgo, 1712), p. 813. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 669, doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-11438. Public Domain.