wiki | DistributedInformation

Dec 12 2008

TWiki: a case study of howto lose users?

Tag: enterprise, foswiki, open source, perl, twiki, twikiapplication, twikifork, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 5:56 pm

In a clear example of TWiki.NET’s new no-testing policy [1], Their star worker has yesterday un-necessarily uploaded over 300 plugins from the wrong branch in Subversion.

Rather than testing each contrib before uploading, as has been the policy on TWiki.org since the Plugins web was created, TWiki.org is now full of buggy, outdated or just plain wrong packages. The only stable option they have is to revert the uploads using rcs – as many plugins are either not up to date in subversion, or worse, are works in progress in Subversion.

Adding that to the latest TWiki 4.2.4 release, which was released with failing unit tests, and some very dubious changes:
we have already submitted to them an updated exploit that is present in 4.2.4 for the CVE-2008-5304 XSS exploit
- presumably they will release 4.2.5 in the next week?

Its a pretty sad time for those of us with users on TWiki (as Foswiki hasn’t released yet), but it has certainly spurred us along, now we need it more than we ever expected.

[1] Tom Barton: issues … impeding progress: an excessively rigorous approach to testing that actually inhibited less experienced developers from contributing code; …

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Dec 09 2008

Strawberry Perl rocks Windows.

Tag: enterprise, foswiki, nextwiki, open source, twiki, twikiapplication, twikifork, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 4:22 pm

if you’re working or just running Perl on Windows, drop everything, run, don’t walk, to StrawberryPerl. Adam Kennedy has not only made a real Perl for windows, he’s made a _proper_ Perl . One where CPAN just plain works.

Even better, he’s made a Perl that you can use portably, from your USB stick, so you don’t even need to install Perl on your locked down computer.

To learn about his code, I’m building a FoswikiOnAStick distro based on his code, and then I hope to work out how to extend the concept to other platforms.

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Nov 19 2008

Foswiki: 790 commits in 3 weeks, and now we have a name!

Tag: enterprise, foswiki, new, nextwiki, open source, perl, twiki, twikiapplication, twikifork, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 1:34 pm

3 weeks into a fork compelled by the Trademark problems of the 10 year old TWiki name, and we’re almost fully reborn.

Foswiki – started out as Free, Open Source Wiki – When Community matters.

Next steps for us will be to create the Foswiki Association, and to release Foswiki v1.0 – all before Christmas

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Nov 15 2008

Week 2 in ‘NextWiki’ – still running at breakneck speeds

Tag: enterprise, nextwiki, open source, perl, twiki, twikiapplication, twikifork, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 3:20 pm

We might not yet have a name, but we’ve had over 100 commits per week, plus the 400 odd coming from my importing into our repository. The rebranding changes for the ****** v1.0 release have been declared 80% done, so the worst case estimate would see the other 80% take about 8 weeks .

Our bug and task tracking system’s live, with connections to svn commits, twitters and lots and lots of activity both on irc and the Wiki – Its almost impossible to keep up with everything.

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Oct 29 2008

TWiki stops being open source.

Tag: enterprise, open source, perl, twiki, twikiapplication, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 1:36 pm

In September 2008, there was a TWiki Summit in Berlin, at which a Community Council was elected by Community members to move the TWiki.org project to independence from the TWIKI.NET startup. A few days ago, TWIKI.NET responded, by taking over full control of all of TWiki.org’s servers, locking everyone out and converting the project to Commercial open source.

As I’ve been working on the TWiki codebase for almost 10 years – and started from JOSWiki too, I too feel uncomfortable about this change, Especially as re-signing up to twiki.org requires that I not only agree to a new terms of use, but also to their very evil commercialy based privacy policy – Personal information you provide (or have provided) to TWiki.org may be shared with TWIKI.NET to support ongoing business and communication processes. – essentially saying that they can use your information for marketing themselves, and to sell that information on (you can only opt out of being contacted.)

In the short term, I hope to continue supporting the TWiki installers I build, and with the rest of the active development community, to build an independent alternative.

Please support the twikifork if you’d like to support those that previously developed the codebase called TWiki.

http://blog.musmo.com/2008/10/29/the-end-of-twiki/
http://wordpress.metro.cx/2008/10/28/twiki-is-dead-long-live-twiki/
http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28
http://fosiki.com/blog/2008/10/29/twiki-stops-being-open-source/
http://colas.nahaboo.net/Blog/TWiki_forks
http://michaeldaumconsulting.com/Blog/BlogEntry72
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/29/146201
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=1339353
TWiki's hunt for cash fractures its community (CNET)

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Oct 27 2008

What makes an Enterprise Wiki Special

Tag: enterprise, open source, perl, twiki, twikiapplication, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 1:48 pm

see me at OSDC 2008 – 3-5 December 2008. I’ll be giving a short talk and demo:

Traditional Wikis are about developing ‘legacy’ documents. Wikipedia is an asymptotic example where the ideal is to craft a perfect topic that accurately and concisely covers its subject matter.

Enterprise Wikis have a different focus :- they attempt to dynamically integrate processes, workflows and data, to support and automate an Enterprises Business Intelligence.

They provide integration points to provide not only an up to date status of an Enterprise, but to provide a Historical record of the development of that status, providing a Knowledge management and decision making framework.

Today, Enterprise Wiki’s are Social Knowledge management systems, recruiting peers throughout an organization, but leading into the future, Enterprise Wiki’s will become Knowledge driven Performance indicating Dashboards.

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