fosiki: collaboration systems development, taking TWiki further

Sep 25 2008

Open source culture clash

Tag: enterprise, open source, twiki — Sven Dowideit @ 8:25 pm

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.

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Sep 08 2008

TWiki Summit 2008Q3 in Berlin

Tag: twiki, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 8:30 pm

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.

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Aug 25 2008

firefox 3.x on debian amd64

Tag: debian, javascript — Sven Dowideit @ 1:50 pm

I’ve been running a firefox 3.0 pre-release build for ages now, and finally thought I’d upgrade - (it turns out) mozilla do not provide 64 bit binaries. The i686 build that you can download from getfirefox.org does not work on my debian amd64 system - but not everything is lost.

As I’m a developer, I’m reasonably happy to play with nightly builds - and so - http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ has what I need - today its firefox-3.1a2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2.

Unziped into my non-debian firefox dir, and runs seemingly fine, except that the firefox addins won’t run, as they are scared of firefox versions that they have not been tested on

That too can be solved - edit the application.ini file, and replace the Version=3.1a2pre with Version=3.0.1 or whatever the release is that your addons are willing to work on.

so far, only VMWare’s addon won’t run - perhaps I need to set the Version lower, as it worked on Minefield 3.0pre.

http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=iceweasel&searchon=names&suite=testing&section=all tells me that 3.0.1 is in amd64 debian testing since July 2008

VMWare’s addon to give console access won’t run in the 3.0.1 debian version either - talk about disappointing. The 3.1 nightly build seems to feel faster too, so I suspect I’ll be running that most of the time, and will look to migrate away from VMWare over time.

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Aug 21 2008

Local Government Web Network Conference 2008

Tag: new — Sven Dowideit @ 6:43 pm

I’m at the LgWebNetwork conference in Sydney at the moment - having seen John Allsopp do his thing on “The real and the virtual - closing the circle”, Bobert Beerworth not talking about Beer… and yet Social (networks), and James Robertson (ok, it was about CMS’s free and otherwise), and then Cameron Adams - designer guy and a session on Writing for the web (what no blog?) by Brian Hardy, I’m reminded at how much the Wiki community needs to get out more.

There are so many little improvements Wiki’s should make - just by leaning over the fence a little, and expanding the scope of an Enterprise Wiki into the serious CMS space. We already ‘compete’ reasonably well in the Knowledge Management and Collaboration areas, and by working on the Wiki’s accessibility, we should be able to make it more usable for the less regular users.

Interesting Take-Aways

You should not expect professional content from amateur author
(CMS) solutions should be disposable. If you have not outgrown your cms in 3 years. You bought too much, or you have not grown enough.
There are two types of Open Source CMS’s, Community based and Commercial. Commercial Vendors should be treated the same way as Closed Source ones - they have simply reduced the upfront cost to Zero.
Watch your ‘Geeks’ - they are early adopters that are working out what works, and you will be using those things in years to come.

All in all a refreshing reminder of the ideas I’ve had that get forgotten in the heat of working for clients.

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Aug 20 2008

new look, new name, same Sven

Tag: new — Sven Dowideit @ 11:31 pm

Yep, I finally got sick of typing the 26 letter domain DistributedInformation.com, so I’ve traded down to 10!

fosiki.com

Still working on TWiki and open source, but also doing other Social Apps, including a few in facebook.

I’ll write about the name’s providence later - perhaps I’ll even be able to make up a long convoluted story

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Aug 20 2008

ever had Perl CPAN not work on your debian, even though you installed make etc?

Tag: debian, dtrace, enterprise, new, perl, solaris, twiki — Sven Dowideit @ 4:29 pm

CPAN, while incredibly useful, can be a pain, if you forget that you need to re-configure it after installing essential tools.

For example, if you make the mistake of setting up a basic, non-development Debian virtual machine, configure CPAN, try to use it, and on seeing ‘make’ errors like (from install Bundle::CPAN of all things) :
Running make test Can't test without successful make Running make install make had returned bad status, install seems impossible Running install for module Compress::Raw::Zlib Running make for P/PM/PMQS/Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.012.tar.gz Is already unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.012 Has already been processed within this session Running make test Can't test without successful make Running make install make had returned bad status, install seems impossible Running make for P/PM/PMQS/IO-Compress-Zlib-2.012.tar.gz Is already unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/IO-Compress-Zlib-2.012 Has already been processed within this session Running make test Can't test without successful make Running make install make had returned bad status, install seems impossible

cpan>

You install make apt-get update ; apt-get install build-essential…, only to continue to see the same errors wizz past….

CPAN really truly needs to realise that the make settings are mis configured, and tell you.

What you need to do, is to tell your cpan about it by running:
cpan> o conf init

OR, if you’ve not yet messed (configured) up your cpan, install build-essential first.

And while you’re contemplating using cpan, think hard about trying dh-make-perl instead

Ideally, CPAN should be able to realise that it can’t call make if it does not know where it is - and point this fact out, rather than making it appear as though the package being installed has an issue.

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