Sven Dowideit made a reasonable comment on IRC as well, with links to some objective sources that confirm your analysis:

11:31 <@SvenDowideit> http://foswiki.org/Tasks/HallOfFame and http://develop.twiki.org/~twiki4/cgi-bin/view/Bugs/HallOfFame shows those stats reasonably too

Quite dramatic indeed!

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.

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.

Looks like yet another captain has thrown it's Titanic onto iceberg. We all remember Joomla vs Mambo clashing. Now, who cares of Mambo if there is Joomla? Seems to be quite similar case. I hope you will have same success as Jumla did once..

Hi all. I'm one of the founders of www.MindTouch.com. We make MindTouch Deki (sometimes called DekiWiki). I've been following the coming storm at TWiki for a little bit. Primarily because I've become aware of some core TWiki developers switching their development projects to MindTouch Deki. Secondarily because MindTouch is also open source and we develop a product that loosely competes with TWiki. In fear of stirring up more s**t I want to chime in here.

First let me say I do not know all the details of this mess, but I've met Peter and I think he's a stand up guy who is undoubtedly trying to do what he thinks is best for the TWiki project. Moreover, I think TWiki was way ahead of others players in this space for a long time. So, kudos to all of you.

Trademark aside, who owns the copyright for the Twiki codebase? Does any one entity? In open source, trademark is nice, but copyright is king.

I'm writing because I wanted to make two points.

First. Building a business on an open source project is a balancing act. On one side you're trying to build a sustainable business by creating revenue through customer acquisition. On the other side you have a desire to do what's best for the community of users (distinct from customers), developers, system integrators and VARs. If you're not careful you can put these groups at odds and look like an asshole or even worse, really hurt your business. This balancing act is especially challenging when you're building on a project like TWiki that has been around forever and has had a significant amount, or perhaps even the majority, of development from the community. I believe the easiest way to find balance is to have an open source core that the company(ies) can add value to in the form of development and services or even sell commercial layers of additional functionality on top of this. In this way the devs and users win and also the company(ies) are able to create clear differentiation that helps in the customer acquisition effort. You don't have to look far to see that these are the most successful open source projects and businesses. Apache Web Server is an example of this. So is SugarCRM. In both cases you have an open core that others can build and sell additional value on top of, be it open source, closed source or services.

Second. As previously mentioned there have been many TWiki developers that have migrated to development on MindTouch Deki. I encourage you to take a look at this project and product. It's modern architecture and high quality user experience is being cited as a reason for the switch. http://mindtouch.com/technology is a good resource to learn more about the architecture, http://mindtouch.com/demo provides some demo vids of the platform in action and you may download the FOSS version and source code at the developer community: http://wiki.developer.mindtouch.com

I want to reiterate that Peter and the guys at TWiki.net are surely trying to do what they think is best for the project as a whole. In every case it is true that what is best for the project is also best for the business. And vice-versa. Although sometimes it takes a misstep to realize this. I think it's interesting to juxtapose Acquia/Drupal with what's going on here with TWiki.org/.net. Being on the outside, it's easy to see what was done well and what was done poorly by these two entities.

Best of luck gang and I hope you'll take a look at MindTouch.

Lots of comments on slashdot.

but it was worth coming here just to see that 'The Machine is Us/ing Us' video. For once this 'web 2.0' thing actually made sense about what is different.

Hi First of all thanks for the installer i think it could be great once the bugs are fixed. My problem: After install (apache is running) the configure page loads with one warning "SafeEnvPath" should be filled. after filling the path or leaving it blank and press "Next" i get PAge not found error and the configure page is also gone. all pages regarding Twiki are returning "Error 404" .

Please advice. My system: Windows XP SP2 – fresh install

Glad you are building upon the meme, one of our hopes is that people carry it in different directions and it shouldn't be Socialtext specific (in fact, most Wiki Wednesdays involve multiple wiki projects and people). Please consider noting this on http://socialtext.net/wikiwed and hopefully a Wednesday will work out in your future plans.