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."

Comments

Actual links?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the summary, can we please have the actual links to the projects?

http://opengarden.org/
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki

MindTouch Dream?

[blantonl]

The article really doesn't do a great job of articulating what the Mindtouch Dream framework actually is.

FTA:
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.

I'm having a hard time understanding what MindTouch Dream actually provides. Is it a development environment framework? A IDE? It isn't clear to me how an application written in "MindTouch Dream" can also be PHP -or- .NET -or- C#.

Deki on the otherhand is clear to me, it is a port of MediaWiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki with extensions and provisions for managing Microsoft documents, AJAX support, and exposure as a Web service (REST based).

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.

Re:MindTouch Dream?

[Angst Badger]

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.

Now I understand

[stocke2]

on their site they say the love open source and use mono,debian,apache,etc...
now I understand why they don't work at MS anymore
they got canned

They ALMOST Get It

[TheDarkSavant]

They seem so proud of themselves for being open source. Come to find out, their product only exists so users of MS Office can share their documents. Anyone else see the irony in that?

GPL Interpretation

[zzzmarcus]

I think it's worth noting for anyone considering hosting a version of DekiWiki that MindTouch/OpenGarden interprets the GPL to mean that any USER of the software should have access to the full source including any modifications you've made (a la Affero GPL).

worst headline and summary EVAR

[ChrisCampbell47]

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.