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Start-Up Delivers Open Source Offerings to Build User Base
The new wiki start-up founded by former Microsoft employees, MindTouch, has just announced two new open source offerings to help bolster their user base. MindTouch Dream, a development framework and Deki, a wiki-based document sharing program that was built using Dream, will both be debuted at this year's OSCON, currently underway. From the article: "Applications written with MindTouch Dream can be done in PHP or .Net languages such as C# or Visual Basic. Programs can run on Microsoft Windows machines or Novell's Mono software for running .Net applications on Linux or Unix."
All in all, I'm a little confused as to the exact value this release brings, other than some better support for M$ based content environments.
It is indeed vague, and since their site is thoroughly slashdotted right now, it will remain so if and until I remember to check it out later.
Support for MS document formats is, however, a pretty big deal. If I had a dollar for every time an OSS solution was rejected in my workplace because it didn't support MS docs, I'd have enough money to buy a legitimate copy of Windows XP. Some people regard playing nice with MS software to be some kind of impurity or treason, but as a practical matter, it provides for easy inroads to business environments.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Plone supports them. You can add doc files to plone and it can extract all the data, catalog it, index it, and make it searchable. If you choose a open, non-proprietary format like ODF it can even show it to you as HTML.
I guess I am one of those people who don't see the point of building a wiki that consists of uploading DOC files. It defeats the purpose of a wiki in the first place. At that point it's a CMS and virtually every CMS will let you upload documents of any type.
evil is as evil does
In other words, it's impossible to write open source software using anything other than Linux and Perl. Gotcha.
And the number of comments shows it. 30 comments after 6 hours on the main page? That must be a new low. Sorry ScuttleMonkey, but hang your head in shame.
One simple rule for its versus it's