Gingko developers part ways, development to continue

Posted by Prion
Aug 22, 2014 at 07:20 PM

Maybe I am wrong but I read this mail as an indication that Gingko may not be profitable enough to support two people, which (if correct) might not be the fault of the Gingko team per se as many innovative online authoring platforms have already fallen by the wayside, see e.g. Editorially. Gingko while perhaps not growing as fast as originally envisioned by the team has from the beginning chosen to charge for their service, a difficult decision for a startup but perhaps a good one in the long run. See this post for an insightful perspective: https://paperpile.com/blog/2014/08/06/why-web-startups-for-researchers-should-charge-their-users/
Gingko seems to be doing well enough to be around and while I am not very optimistic that the pace of development will be the same now that the lead developer has left, it is no reason to fret either because in my experience Gingko is both stable and functional as it is.
For me, Gingko was an impulse buy but to my own surprise one that I did not regret. You will still have to think and write yourself but a no-frills feature set combining a useful plain-text markup with stable and very responsive online availability and best of class structural rearrangement capabilities makes for a useful writing tool. Unfortunately the much anticipated offline capability has become a very faint glimmer of hope after the demise of the lead developer but I have no inside knowledge here.
Gingko is still worth a look in my opinion if anyone is after an online writing environment that does not merely intend to copy a traditional word processor.