The community formerly known as TWiki.org has entered the home stretch to strip off its burdens of the past.

Tags: community, fork, foswiki, opensource, twiki

Yesterday, 2008-10-27: 21:00 GMT, just a minute before the regular TWiki release meeting, the company TWIKI.NET announced unilaterally that the best for the TWiki.org project would be for them to take over governance. With it comes a complete lock down of the community site. From that minute on, all long-time contributors have lost access to their code. Counter-reaction: the community has left the building, leaving TWIKI.NET without a contributing community. Question: is it a sensible move for a venture capital firm that depends on a healthy Open Source community to lock it out?

Tags: community, fork, opensource, twiki

Get a decent T(wiki)-Shirt in the TrickyWikiShop. Have your favorite slogan on the back when you meet the TWikiCommunity on the upcoming TWiki Community Summit in Berlin on 4th and 5th September.

Tags: merchandise, twiki

Aron, thanks for your warm words about TWiki. We still appreciate it, as we are all still deeply linked to our roots. These are roots that we left behind now as we build up the TWiki successor called Foswiki right now.

Thanks also for offering that we all are welcome to come over to DekiWiki. I really am a fan of DekiWiki and highly appreciate the gr8 work MindTouch does to produce such a high quality product.

However, TWiki somewhat became our second nature, so most, if not all developers stay on course doing whatever we always did, just faster and not threatened by Peter's trademark.

I only wished he would not see a need to turn around and use the trademark against the core of TWiki, its own community. That was not for the best of the project for sure. Peter obviously did not assess the situation clear enough coming to the conclusions and actions as outlined in the above posting.

Most probably, this is not for the best of TWiki.net either, as it might have become "radioactive" for more venture investments. They might milk the open sources for some time but the product already starts to rotten with TWiki.net not able to execute.

Not so Foswiki. The number of people that take part is just amazing as proven by pure number of submissions in the recent surveys to find the new brand name.

TWiki was in the transition from one governance model with a sole dictator to another one with an elected board of directors and an association to promote the project and take care of legal matters. This process failed and Peter installed an even more restrictive dictatorship by ruling the project from within his new company called TWiki.net.

Frankly, we have seen this coming and we tried to keep the project true Open Source. From TWiki's perspective we failed. From Foswiki's perspective we now work unleashed from the curse of a bad governance structure.

Just have a look at http://foswiki.org. This new old community is working like crazy to get the new release out. And we will do it. It will be a much better wiki than TWiki ever was. All of the roadmap for TWiki-5 will be executed on Foswiki. The Foswiki Association, the formal body for this project, will come to live very soon.

So basically, we just get what we want. It only needs a bit more work. All these efforts are more than worth it as the new site already shows. And we just started. This is only weeks ago and look at it…

Note, that these are the same people that have formerly been known as the TWiki community. Just imagine how badly TWiki was managed looking at the unleashed energy and abilities that people can now unfold on the new project.

And we are not done with it. It's renovation & innovation time.

I did not see any Core developers leave!

Hi Aaron,

I am sorry. But I have been involved in TWiki for quite some time now. I did see all active developers to switch from TWiki to Foswiki (formerly NextWiki). I believe that your post is merely trying to attract our developers.

Please name any developer who changed. That would be really interesting.

The community formerly known as TWiki.org has entered the home stretch to strip off its burdens of the past.

On November 18th, the community has voted for a new name for the project that recently forked off TWiki.org and which hit the front pages recently under the working title NextWiki. So welcome the new old player.

This is the start of a great new brand that is about to evolve at foswiki.org The tagline of the project is

The Free and Open Source Wiki

which obviously is reprocessing the trauma of the Hostile takeover of the Open Source Project TWiki but also targets at its best competitors in the market segment, which are not Open Source.

It remains to be seen if this new project will be able to catch up with the field, as it was dropping behind recently, according to the Magic Quadrant for Social Software, 2008. In this paper, Gartner categorizes TWiki as a niche player only whereas it was on par with Socialtext in the Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007. That might be the result of the long paralysis caused by the governace crisis over the recent years on the TWiki project, which finally culminated in the recent fork 3 weeks ago.

This paralysis obviously has been overcome as the new project Foswiki shows an impressive amount of activities by all members. Long-time contributors, that went on strike as the trademark issues on TWiki started to manifest, now show an outburst of activities, committing and impressive stream of updates and bugfixes to the new platform. Surely, a vast amount of work is related to rebranding the software by pinching the string "TWiki" out of every place.

The questionnaire on finding the new brand name for the project had an impressive 100 submissions spot on just within a few days. There was a prior survey among the community to find out about its likings for a new name that had even more submissions. Compare this with just a hand full of members that dared to voice up on the old TWiki project during all of its quarrels. That's over now and people obviously have fun again to volunteer.

There was already very positive feedback on the cheers-and-donate mailing list coming from outside. One of which says:

The new website is very appealing and the first impression is not "bitter" but "better", so keep that up! A big cheer for everyone involved in this initiative!!

Still, according to the criteria for a product to be listed on the Magic Quadrant study by Gartner, it seems quite probable that TWiki will drop out on 2009, as it lost its community which created the product before. Regarding its Open Source process, TWiki can be considered dead and with it goes its core engine. Foswiki, on the other side, now continues work on the engine with a lot of verve, but won't show up easily on a forthcoming 2009 Magic Quadrant as it still has to build up its new brand and user base. However, as most authors of extensions have moved to Foswiki and now maintain their work on the new platform, moving from TWiki to Foswiki is a natural choice to keep up with upstream updates and improvements.

TWIKI.NET, the new owner of TWiki.org, won't rest and just watch. They are actively working on interesting applications to address intranet needs build on top of the TWiki engine. The fact that this software can be used to build applications like that is great in its own and TWIKI.NET does score in that field as far as can be seen from outside. But of how much value are such applications in the long run, when the platform they are build on erodes? TWIKI.NET is funded by venture capital paying a bunch of developers in Asia and elsewhere. Time will show if that business plan pays off to cope with all the open road works that they have to face all alone now. Good luck from WikiRing.

Tags: community, fork, foswiki, opensource, twiki