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

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.

What a busy week. We’ve now been freed up to execute our plans, and so as of the first NextWiki meeting (4am Sydney time - i’m shattered) we have:

A plan for a new name (round one selections done), so we can re-brand with our own message and a functioning web site, with a newly created skin.
We’ve also set up a Subversion repository, in which we’ve already begun work on the new release, and the future release and added more automated testing facilities to ensure release quality only goes UP.
A massive cheer and support squad from an amazing number of users and helpers came to visit (and stay) us - some even just poping into the IRC channel to say hi and good luck, and then instantly logged off - not even time for us to thank them. AMAZING

We’re also working on geo-distributed Wiki servers, both for speed (your requests will go to your nearest server) and for redundancy - so its likely that in the near future, you’ll be able to replace your TWiki with something faster and more scalable (I played with searching a bit, and was receiving 1365 results in a 1.25MB html file as fast as my net connection would go).

For anyone worried about what the NextWiki fork means to you, here’s an excerpt from WhatTheForkMeans :

The democratic community model has worked for the TWiki community - developers and other contributors - and has brought you TWiki v3, 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2. That is why the reaction against the recent piracy has been so strong, and so unanimous. All the key TWiki developers are now working on the fork. The democratic nature of the project means that there is no weak point in the governance model (see Rod Beckstrom’s book for more about the power of leaderless organisations).

The winds of change have set people thinking, as well as brought back to life people who were previously inactive because of what was happening in the old project. The initial chaos is clearing fast, and plans are being made. Some of the plans include bringing back upgrade scripts, and using them to be an import tool - so upgrades will be much easier. Because we’re going to have to rename so many topics, we’re working on backwards compatibility code, migration tools etc, which will make things much simpler into the future. It’s hard to say exactly how long before we are able to release, but to put it in perspective, the biggest challenge we face is rebranding the code and documentation to avoid the unwelcome attentions of Peter Thoeny’s lawyers.

Why you should not be afraid your TWiki site will fall apart. KennethLavrsen (the ex-TWiki release manager) has summarised our position:

One thing that some key developers promised me when I agreed to support a fork (if needed) was that the fork remained 100% backwards compatible. This is one of the make or break ones. I do not have the funding to train 1000+ users to learn new terminology. It will be work enough to teach them that TWiki is no longer TWiki.

• KennethLavrsen - 30 Oct 2008

For this reason we have asked Kenneth to continue to lead in the project’s ReleaseTaskTeam - assisted as before by SvenDowideit, and to only allow the next release out the door when this promise is fulfilled. The entire decision making (and action taking) team has moved from TWiki to the Fork. Our direction, goals and aspirations have not really changed - we’re just less encumbered.As for upgrades; at this point there is no reason to change the way you have always done things. We will do our very best to make sure the upgrade is as painless as possible; we recognise that most of the people who use TWiki seek security, continuity and stability above everything else.

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)

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.

Easy installation on Windows, Linux and OSX!

Trivial upgrades of TWiki and TWiki Plugins

Summary: This package enables you to quickly and easily install a pre-configured TWiki 4.2 ’software appliance’ on Windows, by using the free VMware Player or VMware Server - like another computer running within your computer. This generally performs better than a normal WindowsInstallCookbook approach and is easier to install than IndigoPerlCookbook (takes just 5 minutes, a bit like installing a hard disk that has TWiki and Linux pre-installed). Although running TWiki on Linux on top of Windows may seem complicated, it’s actually much simpler than installing TWikiOnWindows - no TWiki or Linux knowledge is needed to get a working TWiki installation!

This uses TWiki VM 4.2.3 released on 12 September 2008. It is installed using SvenDowideit’s fosiki TWiki debian package repository to make upgrades, and installation of TWiki Plugins (with external dependencies) easy.

TWiki 4.2 for windows - with fully integrated native installers that will update your Computer with perl, apache and other tools needed to run TWiki.

The first of these installers released is the  Windows TWiki installer, and includes

1. Apache 2.2, (apache_2.2.10-win32-x86-openssl-0.9.8i.msi)
2. ActiveState Perl (ActivePerl-5.8.8.824-MSWin32-x86-287188.msi)
3. Gnu Grep
4. Gnu rcs
5. Vanilla TWiki 4.2.3.

If the installer detects that you already have the same version (or later) of apache, perl, grep or rcs installed, it will only install the needed components. TWiki is installed into c:\Program Files\TWiki. The main change to the installer is that it now tries to detect non-English ‘Program Files’ directories and install into the right place.

Please download it, try it out and report your impressions, gripes, bugs and successes here on TWiki.org, or in the TWiki Bugs system.

Another TWiki innovation brought to you by fosiki, a  WikiRing.com founding partner.

If like me, you’re looking for an older release of Solaris - so you can replicate a client’s setup, you can find them at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/releases.jsp

I couldn’t find it without help - as Sun’s web site is a study in how to make things impossible to find.

Now to install Solaris 10 update 3 (11/06) on my old ultra sparc 5 - yep, 10 year old tech. its been sitting in the garage for the last year or so, but as its built like a tank, it seems to start fine. I do wish the 10K 18.4G Quantum cheetah wasn’t quite such a painful noise though.

My client chooses to use the http://www.sunfreeware.com/ packages - which means that to get Perl 5.8.8 humming (and subversion so I could commit TWiki fixes), required me to install:

• db-4.2.52.NC-sol10-sparc-local
• diffutils-2.8.1-sol10-sparc-local
• expat-2.0.1-sol10-sparc-local
• gcc-3.4.6-sol10-sparc-local
• gdbm-1.8.3-sol10-sparc-local
• grep-2.5.1a-sol10-sparc-local
• libiconv-1.9.2-sol10-sparc-local
• libintl-3.4.0-sol10-sparc-local
• libxml2-2.6.31-sol10-sparc-local
• make-3.81-sol10-sparc-local
• ncftp-3.2.1-sol10-sparc-local
• neon-0.25.5-sol10-sparc-local
• neon-0.28.3-sol10-sparc-local
• openssl-0.9.8i-sol10-sparc-local
• pcre-7.8-sol10-sparc-local
• perl-5.8.8-sol10-sparc-local
• rcs-5.7-sol10-sparc-local
• subversion-1.4.4-sol10-sparc-local
• swig-1.3.36-sol10-sparc-local
• wget-1.11.4-sol10-sparc-local
• zlib-1.2.3-sol10-sparc-local

and after all that, I’m having weird spillover issues with CPAN, caused by having the built in Perl 5.8.4 in the PATH before /usr/local/bin/perl (the 5.8.8)

So if you have more than one Perl installed, and want to use CPAN - BE CAREFUL to set the PATH to use your desired Perl’s path first - calling it directly will lead to problems.

Larry Augustin talks about the difference in how open source is selected and perceived between the US and Europe - roughly boiling down to:

US companies see Open source as a free ride they can take to getting their millions, whereas Europeans see Open source as a way to reduce risk, and localise expertise.

In many things Australia follows the US examples - but with their economy imploding due to criminally negligent stupidity, and the Australian government contemplating a 50% tax rebate for companies that work on open source - perhaps things are looking up here.

The TWiki.org open source project has a governance crisis for exactly this mismatch reason. The main code contributors for the last 5 years have been, well, me and Crawford Currie - both of us with very European ideals for the project, and most of the users and other contributors feel the same way. Then, last year, Peter, the project founder found some angel funding to build a startup to capitalize on his ownership of the trademark - very much in the US open source way.

This isn’t being handled cleverly enough PR wise - most likely because the ‘US’ open source style companies aren’t even aware that they are behind.

I wasn’t able to travel from Sydney, Australia to Berlin for this summit - which means I’ve missed all 3 of them so far :(.

I was able to listen in on the conference calls made for the governance discussions, and was quite amazed at the strong commonality in the communities approaches and desires. I guess spending over 5 years talking over the same frustrations, and attempting solutions to them brings everyone on board extremely cohesively.

An amazing thing was that with Tom Barton (CEO) there, we heard from yet another TWIKI.NET decision maker that they were not aware of the feelings of the community - extremely scary for a startup that alleges to be working in the interests of the community.

Next major hurdle seems to be trademark control - Peter owns the ‘TWiki’ trademark, and TWIKI.NET wants to leverage that to gain an advantage in the TWiki community. It seems to me that the best response is for the community to avoid the issue - by doing what WireShark did when faced by a similar issues with the ‘Ethereal’ trademark - Rename and Re-brand the open source project.

There seems hope that things may not come to that - the second and final day saw the election of an Interm council to guide TWiki to a lasting democratic setup.

Either way, there is definitely cause to be optimistic about the project known as TWiki. Many thanks to Kenneth of Motorola for organising and hosting the Summit.