If you don’t like text, there is also a visual explanation.
It started with HackMD
HackMD is the origin of this project, which was mostly developed by Max Wu and Yukai Huang. Originally, this was open source under MIT license, but was relicensed in October 2017 to be AGPLv3. At the same time, hackmd.io was founded to offer a commercial version of HackMD.
The AGPLv3-version was developed and released by the community, this was for a while referred to as “HackMD community edition”.
For more on the splitting of the projects, please refer to A note to our community (2017-10-11).
HackMD CE became CodiMD
In June 2018, CodiMD was renamed from its former name “HackMD” and continued to be developed under AGPLv3 by the community. We decided to change the name to break the confusion between HackMD (enterprise offering) and CodiMD (community project), as people mistook it for an open core development model.
For the whole renaming story, see the issue where the renaming was discussed.
CodiMD went independent
In March 2019, a discussion over licensing, governance and the future of CodiMD lead to the formation of a distinct GitHub organization. Up to that point, the community project resided in the organization of hackmdio but was for the most part self-organized.
During that debate, we did not reach an agreement that would have allowed us to move the repository, so we simply forked it. We still welcome the HackMD team as part of our community, especially since a large portion of this code base originated with them.
For the debate that lead to this step, please refer to the governance debate and the announcement of the new repository.
CodiMD became HedgeDoc
With two actively named forks sharing the same name, both insisting on being the original/actual owner of the name CodiMD, people became rightfully confused about the projects sharing the same name.
After roughly a year of being stuck on the name issue, the HedgeDoc community decided to take action and started a renaming process in April 2020. With a good head start in the amount of names, it was decided that an entire rebranding should take place and therefore, after a name was agreed on in July 2020, the next step was to find a logo.
In November of 2020, roughly 7 months after the initiative was started, a logo was found, the rebranding of the application as well as all community pages took place and the time of name conflicts was over. (hopefully.)