How will this project move forward - is it left for dead?

[aeneasr]

I am extremely disappointed that gitbook has moved away from the open source approach that has brought this product incredible reach, weight, and credibility. Moving to a closed-source, managed platform with serious vendor lock-in is incredibly disappointing and - in my opinion - devalues the many hours people spent on building an ecosystem around gitbook, and even your own contributions and community management. Making the open source ecosystem a second-class citizen is - again, in my opinion - the wrong move and puts incredible irony on "Already trusted by over 450,000 users", they certainly trusted in the open source ecosystem.

Seeing that there have been no commits since late august (except some really minor bc-compatibility changes on the 2.0 branch) and that PRs as well as issues have been extremely stale with not even a single interaction from core maintainers, I assume this project is ... left dead?

I hope you can either verify or dispute this and hopefully re-assure the community. If you're offended by my language, please understand the frustration and sadness I realized when seeing this.

[fdesjardins]

I sent support an email in August and received this response:

Sorry for the delay. Thanks for getting in touch, I'm really sorry we're causing frustration and confusion. We're really focused on the future of GitBook and having a hard time to keep up with all the channels (Slack, GitHub, here on Helpscout, etc.). I will discuss it with the team so we can at least add a message to the README. To answer your questions:

> What is the status on the GitHub repository? Is the software discontinued?

We do not plan on adding new features to the "old" GitBook and the new version doesn't have a command line interface. For now, the legacy GitBook can still be used and will remain available for users hosting it on their own servers. For the others, the idea is to migrate to the new version. I hope that clarifies our position, please let me know if you have any other questions!

I asked if they would update the README with the current status, but I can't see any official statements in GitHub.

[aeneasr]

Thank you! It's s super disappointing and shows little respect to the great community this project has. A shame that this is communicated so poorly (well, not at all I guess?) and that authors/company show so little interest in this. If there is no understanding of the/this user base, the possibility that the new closed source product may pull off something like this in the future is high - doesn't really incite any trust. This is not how you govern successful open source.

Time to move on, here are some open source alternatives I found interesting while researching. Hope this helps. Please feel free to extend this list below and I'll update it or move it to the opening post - I didn't have a lot of time yet for research:

Dedicated to documentation

• docusaurus: Used by most facebook projects (react ecosystem, babel, ...)

Static site generators with markdown support

• gatsby
• vuepress

[jgvictores]

Have not made a clear decision on whether it's time to move on, but here are some more alternatives I'm familiar with, to continue the list:

Dedicated to documentation

• https://docsify.js.org -> https://github.com/docsifyjs/docsify/
• https://readthedocs.org -> https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro/getting-started-with-sphinx.html

Static site generators with markdown support

• https://jekyllrb.com -> powers loads of brilliant sites

Something different with markdown support

• https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools -> https://codelabs.developers.google.com/

Even more

• https://alternativeto.net/software/gitbook