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disqus: hackmd
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A note to our community
(Introducing HackMD Enterprise Edition)
===

Dear Markdown hackers,

We are back with great news! Today we are introducing **HackMD Enterprise Edition (EE)**, a new HackMD service with features specifically designed for knowledge sharing and collaboration. We also promise ongoing free hosting of **HackMD.io** and commit to continuous support of the **HackMD Community Edition (CE)**. But most important of all, we want to thank you, from deep in our hearts.

### Thank You
The past six months had been very hectic for our team. Four members in our team of five had (finally!) made it out of graduate schools. In addition to school projects, finals, and theses, we've also seen significant growth in HackMD.io. Our hosted notes increased from 100,000 in March to more than 220,000 today. Our registered users had doubled from 16,000 to more than 33,000.

We've been blown away by how quickly our project went viral and we are grateful for all the supportive feedback. While the cost of hosting HackMD.io and the social expectations of finding jobs had laid great pressure on us, we were amazed and humbled by all the attention HackMD had received. We've heard all your questions, comments, suggestions, and complaints. We deeply appreciate all of them. That is why we are committed to keep making HackMD the best tool for knowledge management and collaboration with Markdown syntax. To make this effort sustainable, we will soon be offering HackMD(EE).

### HackMD Enterprise Edition (EE)
HackMD(EE) is our response to your requests. We added two long-awaited features so teams using our services could have better privacy. HackMD(EE) comes with **advanced permission controls** over each note and **private images hosting** service. The new **book mode** makes knowledge organization and presentation much better.

To free our users from the overhead of managing their own instances, HackMD(EE) would be a hosted **Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)** offering. We now provide service manager a **panel for notes management and users access monitoring**. You can leave the maintenance and other hassles to us. HackMD(EE) also comes with a **new overview page** to aid notes organization and knowledge discovery. We will provide customer supports and other customizable options, so you can focus on making great things and sharing valuable insights.

### HackMD Community Edition (CE)
The support from the open source community had been inspiring and encouraging. As a feedback, we promise to keep HackMD(CE), the community edition, open source. To free the community of doubt, we are **changing the open source license from MIT to AGPL 3.0**. This way, **NO ONE**, we the HackMD team included, can take the fruit of the collaboration of the community and make it proprietary. If you had contributed code to HackMD before, please also see [our request for changing license here](https://hackmd.io/s/r1_4j9_hZ).

We promise not blocking any pull requests, even those with features similar to HackMD(EE). We would also continue patching vulnerabilities and fixing bugs. For the sake of consistency, we would rename the repository to HackMD(CE). We recently invited two most active community members, [SISheogorath](https://github.com/SISheogorath) and [ccoenen](https://github.com/ccoenen), to be the moderator of HackMD(CE) and be the community's advocates. They will make sure we keep our promises to you.

### HackMD.io Remains Free
For the past two years, we've run HackMD.io as a free service providing real-time collaboration and knowledge management across the globe. HackMD.io hosted shared notes for countless tech conferences, meetups, seminars, and hackathons. We are so grateful to be part of the exchange of so many great ideas. We are therefore committed to **keep HackMD.io free and open to everyone**, as it always was. It is our privilege to have the opportunity to contribute to the greater community. We will keep it that way.

### New Playground: Demo.HackMD.io
Features available in HackMD(EE) would be available in demo.hackmd.io, an instance with ephemeral storage. User of this instance would have access to management panel and advanced permission controls, among other new enterprise features of HackMD(EE). However, notes created on demo.hackmd.io would be deleted weekly. These make demo.hackmd.io a playground great for feature try-outs, disposable notes, or other creative usages. :wink:

The past two years were quite an adventure. We would like to thank you for all your supports. As always, please don't hesitate to [open an issue on GitHub](https://github.com/hackmdio/hackmd/issues), join the [chat on Gitter](https://gitter.im/hackmdio/hackmd) or [drop us a mail](mailto:[e-mail]) if you have any questions or comments. We'd love to hear.

Happy hacking,