Hi all, I have a much longer mail in the works, a quick one for now. I think it is a major strategic mistake to exclude discussions about interoperability from this list. As Bastien pointed out in his talk at Emacsconf there is only a single list for both users and developers. Discussion about interoperability with tools for working with Org are entirely valid subjects for the user list. Obviously help and support for other tools is not valid for the list, but questions about interoperability or incorrectness of some external tool should always be valid.
We must provide strong technical leadership for all tools that want to work with Org syntax otherwise we risk it spiraling out of control. Forcing discussions off list will split the community and I think the fact that Karl's work made it to this list so late in the process shows the danger of trying to exclude certain discussions. I follow this list, I keep the community up to date with my work, I have no idea where to look for other Org related dicussions, nor frankly do I have time to look for them. I suspect I am not alone in this. Whether a certain portion of the Org community likes it or not, there is another portion for whom Org syntax already has a life beyond Org mode (e.g. academic papers and computation notebook style workflows). For some workflows documents written in Org syntax are a primary exchange format and format of record, not just an internal format from which documents for sharing are generated. The plain text nature of Org syntax and the freedom that it enables also means freedom from Emacs. Empowering users to own and control their own data to use with their own tools is the whole point. The fact that this means that it works outside Emacs is a critical feature for many data preservation use cases. Enough for now. Best! Tom