TWiki.net Kicks Out All TWiki Contributors

David Gerard noted an interesting story going down with a relatively minor project that has interesting implications for any Open Source project. He writes "Ten years ago, Peter Thoeny started the TWiki wiki engine. It attracted many contributors at twiki.org. About a year ago, Thoeny founded the startup twiki.net. On 27th October, twiki.net locked all the other contributors out of twiki.org in an event Thoeny called 'the twiki.org relaunch.' Here's the IRC meeting log. All the other core developers have now moved to a new project, NextWiki. Is it a sensible move for a venture capital firm that depends on a healthy Open Source community to lock it out?"

Comments

Answer:

[ustolemyname]

No.

Re:Answer:

[electrictroy]

Yes.

Stealing other people's work is a very effective strategy to succeed in business without really trying. Look at Microsoft.

Re:Answer:

[electrictroy]

Yes.

Stealing other people's work is a very effective strategy to succeed in business without really trying. Get free work, then package it as retail software, and $profit$.

Server logs reveal real reason for lockout

[Anonymous Coward]

bidi-bidi-bidi bidi-bidi-bidi bidi-bidi-bidi...

Re:Server logs reveal real reason for lockout

[JustOK]

how the buck rogers is this off topic?

Re:Server logs reveal real reason for lockout

[digitalgiblet]

That was PRE-conversion Twiki.

Now it is Buddha-Buddha-Buddha.

Re:Server logs reveal real reason for lockout

[TheLink]

And now it's Bada-Bada-Boom-Crash!

Re:Server logs reveal real reason for lockout

[yttrstein]

Indeed. It's right here:

OliverKrueger install ssh keys.
and a backdoor. :)

Bad IRC-Fu on the part of the forking kids. If I'd seen that I would have had everyone locked the hell out in under ten seconds as well.

Re:Server logs reveal real reason for lockout

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I read that as a joke.

You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

but on the other hand, yes.

Re:You make a good point...

[MindKata]

"but on the other hand", as the title says, "Is it a sensible move for a venture capital firm that depends on a healthy Open Source community to lock it out?" ... then this sounds very like playing into the hands of close source software marketing. Implying effectively, Close_Source==safe, Open_Source==unsafe.... But thats just playing to the Microsoft marketing style line. Open source is still open. Plus out of all open source projects, this is a rare event, so its not a reason to be scared off from open source projects. Plus its just as bad when close source changes direction, to maintain its position of lock in.

Re:You make a good point...

[Ethanol-fueled]

Close_Source==Money, Open_Source==!Money

Fixed it for you. I'm a noob taking a software engineering class at a community college.

We had a consultant come in for show-and-tell and he made some very good points, but he told us to stay away from open source because(shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.

But how is that different from working on proprietary software? Working on proprietary software earns a paycheck.

Note that the above is not my personal opinion, but after I graduate I won't have any more basements to live in and I will be hungry.

Re:You make a good point...

[electrofelix]

The majority of the big open source projects are developed in collaboration by companies paying their employees to work on them in order to get more out of the software in their environment. So it suggests that the consultant in question may not be the best person to listen too

If you plan to try and make a name for yourself in the hope of getting spotted and hired, that's probably a tall order. The rest of us just look for a job that will result in us getting paid to work on open source.

Of course it also ignores the other benefits to a developer: Gain experience with a particular language, sharpen your coding, prove that you're coding is good enough to be accepted by a project, become familiar with various API's.

Being able to demonstrate in an interview that you are familiar with the API's, language, coding style, algorithms that are in use in the job that you are applying for should prove invaluable. Too many proprietary companies have a habit of strapping you down with so many NDA's that it's virtually impossible to discuss what you're doing in your current job aside from vague details.

Re:You make a good point...

[Foofoobar]

Well I don't know of any open source developers who are hungry or live in basements. In fact they are VERY well paid; they work on their open source projects as part of their job (sponsored by their employer) or in their spare time (hobby,cash on the side). As for not making money, it's only when you look at it from a TRADITIONAL model. Every developer can make money if they want once they become a contributor to a project. They can write a book on the project, they can expend the project, they can start a support company for the project, they can do training or installing of the project, etc etc.

This is why we don't live in basements and are successful. We see more than one answer and more than one way to make money. Tfrue entrepeneurs realize this and don't just sit on their ass and whine about open source tealing their glory; they realize that open source is the new market and adapt to the changing market.

Perhaps you will realize this when you come out of your parents basement.

Re:You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

I will let you in on a little secret. I went to a division III college in a small town. The people I ended up graduating with in computing mostly had trouble finding jobs and those that did seemed bored by them, mostly working in insurance, accounting, etc. They were taught VB, Java, and Cobol in school, but not necessarily how to think like a programmer.

I ended up going back to school at a much larger school, and getting a degree in an analytical field, which has a piece of open source software that I use at my job regularly. I have contributed my time and efforts to improving this project because I use it and need those improvements, and it helps others. I do this during work sometimes, but often times at night. I do this because I *like* it. I have no conceptions of making a name for myself.

And now I've just switched cities and had to find a new job. It's tough for a lot of people. Guess what? During the interviews, it comes up that I actually enjoy programming, contribute to this project, and generally have a good understanding of programming. I've had three offers this month already, in a tough economy.

The point? It's much easier to find work when you are passionate about what you're doing, as many open source authors are. It's not cause and effect, it's correlation. Those who are working on open source tend to be those who really enjoy programming, and that is of course correlated with being good at it. I would not listen to anyone who told me to 'stay away' from it if I enjoyed it, that sounds like a pathetic person.

Re:You make a good point...

[bjelkeman]

I work on open source software and get paid. So there!

Actually we are looking for a really experienced HTML / CSS programmer/designer preferably with a background Python and Django. Some PHP experience is of curse useful. Provable work on open source code is a large merit. If you are based in Europe is better than any other continent for us. If you are based in Stockholm or Delft you can probably hopp over for an interview. :)

Re:You make a good point...

[hey!]

Isn't the whole point of free software to limit the impact of this kind of decision? Part of the maximization of freedom is the freedom to stop working with other developers, both the freedom to fork, and the freedom to force others to fork.

If the core developers have the source code, and rights to that source code we are talking about, potentially, three things of value: (1) the project name and (2) access to the source code server and by extension (3) access to the source archives. Of these, the only serious blow is loss of access to the archives.

If the person who organizes a project decides to kick everyone else out, that's his right, so long as he honors any agreements made with the other contributors, such as honoring terms for files they have contributed. Things get most tricky when it comes to patches that have been submitted, but the honorable thing is clear: make the source available for every binary version ever distributed.

Re:You make a good point...

[ChrisA90278]

"Note that the above is not my personal opinion, but after I graduate I won't have any more basements to live in and I will be hungry."

I finished school in 1982 studied CS. In the time between then and now I've written a lot of non-free code. Most would be useless as Open Source as it did things like control a radar system and handle data comming from spacecraft, not the kinds of things that most people need to do. But I've also written some softare that I've given away as GPL. Some for the astronomy comunity, some driver level stuff for Linux a few fixes to a DBMS and so on.

OK, My point is that VERY few Open Source programmers do it full time. Most have day jobs to pay the bills. Only very infrequently have I been able to work on Open source wile getting paid. The two times whaen I did it was correcting bugs in free software that we were using at work. I did those bug fixes on the clock but that amonts to about 20 hours over 20 years. Mostly I'd work at home after dinner rather than watch TV.

Re:You make a good point...

[pla]

he told us to stay away from open source because(shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.

That makes one seriously incorrect assumption - That, in the capacity of doing your 9-to-5 job, you care about fame (outside the local food chain).

I've used open source extensively, and made a few contributions back to the community. You've almost certainly never heard of me, but you can bet the farm that I, my employers and customers, and even the open source community, have all benefited from my use of open source.

If you do FOSS as a way to keep your skill set updated while underemployed, perhaps fame matters. If you just want to use FOSS to make your life better, occasionally giving something back, fame means nothing - I get paid whether I roll my own or use open source to solve the problem; and if I solve a two-month problem in a week by using something that already exists that I can quickly modify to my needs, I look pretty damned good to everyone that matters (ie, my boss or customer)


But how is that different from working on proprietary software? Working on proprietary software earns a paycheck.

Not a real difference, since working on FOSS doesn't preclude earning a paycheck.

Re:You make a good point...

[Mr. Slippery]

I'm a noob taking a software engineering class at a community college.

In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about, but you feel free to come into a forum full of software professionals and make sweeping statements.

Yeah. Good luck with that career, young padawan.

But how is that different from working on proprietary software? Working on proprietary software earns a paycheck.

Working on free software can also earn a paycheck. Big projects have funding.

Also, the vast majority of software developers work on bespoke, in-house projects, not things meant to be turned into COTS products. People pull in a free software package to get a job done for their company, and contributing patches back is usually to their benefit.

For example, I wanted to do some automated testing. I found that WebInject did almost, but not quite, what I needed; I made the changes. All this was on the company's dime. With the boss's permission, I contributed the changes back; we benefit in that this new capability will be part of future releases, rather than requiring me to re-integrate.

We win, the community wins. And that's the day-to-day truth of free software: not people working for free in their basements, but skilled professionals sharing ideas to improve the craft of software.

Re:You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about, but you feel free to come into a forum full of software professionals and make sweeping statements.

Yeah. Good luck with that career, young padawan.

They quoted that what the consultant said was not their personal opinion. People come to slashdot for the discussions, which includes learning, and not all slashdotters are programmers or engineers. Hearing a pontificating "software professional" who can't even understand an entire slashdot whole post would turn me away from computing a hell of a lot faster than a clueless consultant would...or are all so-called "software professionals" also clueless, pontificating consultants?

Re:You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

They quoted that what the consultant said was not their personal opinion. People come to slashdot for the discussions, which includes learning, and not all slashdotters are programmers or engineers.

Yeah, right. He says he's just quoting the consultant. But he couches that between his "fixed" remark and "basement" remark. The opinion is clearly his own. He just has the grace to admit it's based entirely on hearsay.

Re:You make a good point...

[ajs]

We had a consultant come in for show-and-tell

It's too easy to shoot this down here, but I'll just state for the record that you could easily have found someone to speak who would have said anything, so the source isn't really interesting. You're really just stating your own opinion, here. Had you said that, it might have sounded a bit better.

he made some very good points, but he told us to stay away from open source because (shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.

I have not stayed away from open source. I've not had to "log it out full-time." I've not had to "fight amongst other egos." I've never even worried about how well-known my name is.

Open source software provides, for the engineer, three things:

* Very low barrier-to-entry exposure to sophisticated tools
* Exposure to the kinds of practical coding concerns that you will face elsewhere
* The ability to not only claim that you've worked with a technology, but to demonstrate the fruits of your work

If your goal from day one is to be a core contributor to a project, then yes, it will be a lot of work. You might even decide that that's worth it someday, but no one has to make that level of commitment in order to contribute to open source.

Re:You make a good point...

[cptdondo]

I think your consultant was an idiot. The vast majority of Open Source devs are paid by their companies. At my last job I was paid relatively well to give my work away. :-)

Basically we layered some PHP scripts on top of modified elinks code to come up with an end-user configurable industrial panel.

I got paid, the company made money, no egos (other than perhaps the company president) involved.

Granted, I didn't become well-known in the OS world, but really... How many closed source programmers do you know by name? And friends don't count.

I actually did the research to answer this for my last employer. IIRC something like 60% (or maybe 80%) of Open Source developers are paid....

Re:You make a good point...

[i.of.the.storm]

Err if you really want to get pedantic it should be

Close_Source==Money, Open_Source!=Money

because you don't know whether Money is a boolean, you're just comparing the two.

Re:You make a good point...

[mr_mischief]

It is hard for the employee to apply specific knowledge of something like Windows or PhotoShop to another project.

More importantly it's easy for an OSS programmer to apply what he knows about the Linux kernel from one job to his next job where the Linux kernel is the topic of programing work. It's easy to apply experience programming the GIMP, even exact function names and their implementations, to another job improving the GIMP. It's even easy to take code directly from one of these projects and use it in another project with the same license or a compatible license.

That means that for employers, in exchange for giving up the privacy and competitive advantage of keeping their source sealed on a proprietary project, that they gain a few things by going Open Source at least on certain projects. Not only do they often get a project that's already running instead of starting from scratch (which BSD could offer and still let them close the source, even!). Not only do they also have a chance at getting the public to help them develop their project by keeping it open.

They also get to develop specific skills and knowledge in their hiring pool. If someone's an OSS developer for a company's project in his spare time or as one duty at his current employer, he's already well on his way to being productive with the code for which the project's sponsor company needs developers.

Re:You make a good point...

[Austerity Empowers]

Dealing with ego's is eternal. You cannot escape it, anytime, anywhere. They're at work, they're in open source, they run your HOA or your local government. They crap on you all the time. The question is what can you do about it, to achieve what you consider to be an acceptable quality of life.

With open source, you are free to individually decide whether the ego behind a contribution is worth dealing with. He either is so prolific/intelligent/hard working, that his attitude is worth dealing with, or he is not, and you can take your business elsewhere. If enough people agree with you, you've got fork. Plus, your open source code is out there, and your reputation can be justified by actual work you do. You had no paycheck to begin with, so you really don't lose much.

At work, coding professionally, you have to tolerate any egos you work with, period. Whether they contribute or not, whether they may be the bosses drinking buddy/son/daughter/blackmailer/etc. Until he stops working with you, you have to deal with him. Unless he crosses a line (in the US) into harassment of some legally accepted form, all you can do is quit. Your code will be proprietary, and you will only have word of mouth on your side. You lose your paycheck in the process. If enough people quit, maybe something will happen...but in this economy you will struggle to get that level of cooperation in this sector. Note it can be legally problematic to incite your coworkers to quit due to things you may have signed when hired, or other lawsuits.

That's really what it's about. There's no reason not to touch open source or to avoid open source jobs, unless you signed some agreement with your present employer stating that you would not. Plenty of people have made names for themselves in open source, some of which are actually great people.

Trust me, an internet nobody who is about to quote the muppets, never make a decision based on "people". "...So, peoples is peoples. Okay?" They're the same everywhere, every once in a while you land in a good group of motivated people who suppress their egos long enough to do something great...but most of time time you have to create that, starting with yourself, wherever you land.

Re:You make a good point...

[ianare]

That's simply not true ! I must have made oh, about $200 in donations from my open source projects. Over the course of 2.5 years. OK so maybe the guy had a point.

More seriously, these are hobby projects ... I get to do what I want, when I want, simply for the pleasure of coding. If other people actually like my software enough to throw a couple bucks my way, then all the better.
If the consultant was suggesting making any money from hobbyist projects (closed source or not), he is a loon.

Similarly, your consultant is, quite frankly, an idiot if he thinks most open source software gets done by hobbyists. Case in point, not more than 35% of that flagship OSS project, the linux kernel, is done by volunteers.
And on a personal note, while I have never been employed primarily as an open source developer, all my employers have encouraged, or at the very least allowed, me to contribute to OSS projects that were used in-house. Mainly in the form of patches, but hey every bit helps.

Re:You make a good point...

[Anubis350]

This guy isnt lookign to get paid for open source or contribute to cool projects, he's looking to become a rock star and get paid because he made his name, not the guy you really want on an OS project anyway, we already *have* enough egos out there :-p

Re:You make a good point...

[ianare]

Not sure I understand you. Did you use OSS within closed source project, or did you make a new OSS project out of already existing code ?

Re:You make a good point...

[thermian]

We had a consultant come in for show-and-tell and he made some very good points, but he told us to stay away from open source because(shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.
 

For big projects there is truth in that. However there is also truth in saying that the only way to get a really good programing job is to gain lots of experience, and open source is a good place to get it.

I on the other hand have my own FOSS product. I'm the sole developer, although I have accepted some code from others over the years. With a small project you get to set all the timescales, all the goals, everything.

I don't make money with it, but I get invites to universities, free attendance at conferences, and I help with supervision of Msc/Ph.D students who use my stuff. In short, I have a lot of fun.

No-one else has ever shown much interest in joining my project. I don't mind though, I have fun, and being in control of a product used by hundreds of people is actually quite a buzz.

I get my money from my day job, so that's not a worry. If you want to earn money from open source then you either have to create software which is then provided as part of a paid service, get a job for an open source company, or get yourself involved in a big project and work your way up.

Re:You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree, I use TWiki, I contribute code to TWiki. I'm very well paid but I don't work for TWiki, I work for a consulting firm that uses TWiki to help us provide services to our clients.

If they make me jump through a bunch of hoops I'll just switch over to NextWiki and send my code there.

Re:You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I guess we know why you're going to community college...

Writing software at work and working on open source software aren't exclusive. The vast majority of people writing open source do both.

Re:You make a good point...

[Zadaz]

Not that I totally disagree with you, but you are clearly parroting the words of some guy who talked to you for half an hour with little understanding.

Don't base policy decisions on some guy who just came to class one day.

Trust me, consultants don't go talk to undergrads at the coco unless they're selling something.

What was he selling? You should know, you clearly bought it.

Re:You make a good point...

[Aphoxema]

I'd strongly suggest you keep active in the fields that play a more generic role in society, like checking the temperature of meats on a grill, using a cash register, and using those muscles of yours regularly. You may find that, by the time you graduate, you won't have a choice but to compete with open source and if you can't make money off it then it'll just as well be a well educated hobby.

Re:You make a good point...

[Xeger]

That's not the point of open source. The point is this:

- I'm an entrepreneur, or I'm being paid by an entrepreneur or a massive corporate entity, to create software that makes money.

- It is my duty as a professional to implement the most reliable, beneficial solution I can, and to do so at the lowest possible cost.

- With this goal in mind, I look around the ecosystem for existing tools, frameworks and applications that will help me achieve my goal. I will generally find any number of open-source products as well as some closed-source products.

-I choose the product (or most frequently, combination of products) that will best help me achieve my business goal. I make my choice irrespective of how the products are licensed.

And THAT, my friends, is the value proposition of open source. Day after day, software developers everywhere are awakening to the fact that the most reliable, most efficient, quickest-growing tools in the business are free of cost, community-supported, and ripe for the picking.

A very small fraction (perhaps 1%) of the people who adopt a given free software product will find that it doesn't quite suit their needs. Funded by their employer or themselves, they will tweak the product until it does what they want -- they then contributed their tweaks back to the community so others can benefit.

Can it ever be a disadvantage, being forced to contribute one's valuable IP back to the community? Of course it can! If your tweaking represents a key competitive differentiator, then by all means, buy a closed-source (or a dual-source) solution.

But, speaking as a software developer with more than a decade of experience and three patents pending, VERY FEW of the changes we make to our tools and frameworks are original or valuable in the business sense.

It is in our "business logic" where money is made -- the bits of code that sit on top of the frameworks and implement the user-relevant part of your application. And THOSE bits of the application are very seldom open source, nor should they be.

Re:You make a good point...

[Foofoobar]

That's true; couldn't agree more. But I was only responding to the response of 'open source != money' which is a blatant misconception that closed source companies like to spread as FUD.

Re:You make a good point...

[eugene_roux]

...PHP experience is of curse...

Yep.

Sounds about right to me...

Re:You make a good point...

[Laughing Dog]

As has been pointed out, you didn't fix it; you broke it. Generally, != indicates that things are not equal. Study harder, young noob.

Are you the only person in that class? No? Is your community college the only school in your entire country that offers software engineering classes? No? What might that mean?

I work for a slowly growing (non-tech) startup. Periodically, we hire new people. For every single position advertised, we typically see upwards of 200 applicants. We only use the newspaper and Craigslist for job ads, too; we'd probably get over 1,000 if we used Monster or Careerbuilder. Ditching the submissions from people without any sort of college degree doesn't cut down on the number significantly, because most of the people applying have bachelor's degrees. What sets people apart is their experience. If you're not going to have any basements available to you after graduation, you're going to eventually have to deal with the fact that there are a lot of people studying the exact same things that you are, and that those with some sort of verifiable experience are going to be picked over you each and every time. If you've contributed some code to an open source project, you have something to put on your resume' that employers can verify. I.e., you have a portfolio of work done that does not consist of homework assignments.

Working on proprietary software does earn a paycheck, but, if you're not doing it now, to get the job, you're going to need to make yourself stand out from your competitors. Contributing to open source is a good way to do that.

Incidentally, we use PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, Plone, Openbravo, JasperReports, Samba, Apache, and a handful of other open-source offerings in this office in addition to Windows XP for the workstations. Some of these will eventually be replaced with proprietary solutions as we grow, but most won't. When we hire for IT or look for consultants, having a proprietary-only background is going to be one criteria for shortening the resume' stack. At this company, strict proprietary == "round-filed". I.e., the resume' gets thrown in the trash.

Re:You make a good point...

[Duckie01]

Close_Source==Money, Open_Source==!Money

The syntax is correct. It must be true.

Fixed it for you. I'm a noob taking a software engineering class at a community college.

Really.

We had a consultant come in for show-and-tell and he made some very good points, but he told us to stay away from open source because(shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.

No. Trying to get your WORK known. I don't see that much fighting amongst egos either. There's much less office politics involved with open source. If your work is of good quality it'll be accepted.

However, if you're a consultant and gotta talk your way through, open source is DEADLY to your business because all the sudden you've got to SHOW CODE instead of a "working prototype" and a big mouth full of worthless marketing buzz.

But he was wearing a suit and a tie so he's gotta be right.

Re:You make a good point...

[kv9]

Note that the above is not my personal opinion, but after I graduate I won't have any more basements to live in and I will be hungry.

you sound like you need to take an archeology course and... hunting lessons?

Re:You make a good point...

[bjelkeman]

I can't mod as funny, as I already posted in the thread.

Re:You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Myself being a physicist, I profited from open source just by learning about various computer science topics (which I often use in my job).

Thankfully there is a huge public know-how generated by code sharing and open development process, from hardware information gathering to ability to create new programming languages and operating systems.

Basically, only few companies had that kind of "IP" before and they all started in 70's.
Still, even companies like Apple wouldn't be where they are now without huge borrowing from some open source projects. Microsoft on the other side, developed most of it's code in house and still keeps secret many technical details of the OS (being a monopoly, their interest is to keep that information away from competition). Somehow it hit them back, as tech savy users couldn't really take part in Windows decisions and development, and those started hacking on alternative operating systems (and brought birth to massive OSS movement). Even if not full time employees, many people are able to hack in their free time, or even all the time (like many students).

Re:You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say I have a job where my employer would be amenable to releasing my code under a free license. The problem is, my employer has copyright on this code.

What I'd really like is for my project to be able to follow me even after I leave this job some day, say the company folds or whatever.

Should I ask my employer to sign a waiver of copyright/copyright assignment letter, so I can legally say that I have copyright instead of the employer?

Or should I just get them to sign a blanket letter that code will be licensed under a BSD or some other very-free license?

Re:You make a good point...

[Angostura]

Remember folks, never have any hobbies, never do voluntary work, don't sit and stare and a sunset. The pay for any of those is dreadful.

Re:You make a good point...

[rasjani]

Bulls#*t!

I've been doing my own oss projects and never gotten any "fame" for those but just by having knowledge how things work, i've been in it field for something like 15 years and havent had a job that wouldnt either be opensource OR rely opensource apps in some way.

Re:You make a good point...

[vux984]

Yeah, one of my clients used to use "Thinstall" to package a number of .net programs into a single trivial to deploy executables, with some basic encryption and licensing wrapper. It worked well enough and was reasonable, a thousand bucks or so.

Then .net 2.0 came out and our software was fine but their wrapper broke on systems with .net 2.0 installed, and we got in touch with them about an upgrade...

They'd completely rewritten the software, and taken it in a new direction, and it was going to be around $10,000 for the upgrade (although they offered us a break as existing customers, but even then it was out of line for our needs)... and instead of licencing the software, we would be paying per app that we wanted to 'wrap'.... we ended up rolling our own licensing solution, and purchased a highly rated obfuscator. And things have been good for a while now. However, the new obfuscator people seems to be heading in the direction thinstall went... now offering virtual file system, virtual registry, the ability to include .net itself inside the app executable etc... and I have a feeling we won't be using them much longer either. Arrgh.

Meanwhile Thinstall got bought out by VMWare and is now "ThinApp", is still monstrously overpriced for what it really is. Although I can see that it would be worth what its priced at for the enterprise users they are targeting.

Re:You make a good point...

[rtechie]

if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.

This give you a path to becoming "known", painful as it is. In the long run a good public reputation will dramatically increase your earning power.

But how is that different from working on proprietary software?

Working on proprietary software you will be a total unknown. Your name is not going to be on the box, nobody will know you're affiliated with the product unless you personally tell them. Most people working on proprietary software become "known" doing something outside of the company, either outside papers, or collaborative projects or maybe a blog. The most famous programmers at Microsoft, for example, are only well known because of their blogs.

The exception is in games and the game design market where it's ALL proprietary and "talented" engineers are in high demand. Your name might not be on the box, but it IS in the credits. And people in the industry WILL track your progress. The hours in game software development are generally brutal (expect to work at least 60 hours a week and get paid for 40) with relatively low pay. Game programmers are expected to suffer because it's "fun".

Re:You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Close_Source==Money, Open_Source==!Money

Interesting point, but I don't think free open source software was ever about making money. At least the "founders" like RMS never considered it an objective.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

The main reason why closed source will ultimately fail is because you cannot compete against a product of the same solution at zero cost, and the biggest reason why open source has failed to destroy closed source is because it has yet to reach the level of providing the same solution.

Provided operating systems and interfaces aren't rewritten to deliberately obsolete products, and laws are not made to deliberately restrain multiple implementations of the same ideas (patents), free open source software will eventually prevail.

Take outsourcing for example. Manufacturing has gone overseas because other countries can make it cheaper. All other things being equal, manufacturing goes to the place with the lowest cost, and free open source software has the lowest cost (zero). The only issue is again, the level of the solution provided, and laws governing "intellectual property."

Re:You make a good point...

[NateTech]

Weasel words. The majority of big open source projects"... let's get real here...

The kernel devs, the Apache Foundation guys, some Ubuntu devs, the employees at RedHat and yeah.. a few others... is about it for "big" open source projects.

Thousands and thousands of mediocre programmers slog away creating thousands and thousands of "open source" software packages that go nowhere. Fast.

Companies on the other hand, create things customers want, or they go out of business.

There's no penalty for crappy code other than being "unknown" in open source development. In fact, I've met a few open source developers that think this means that they just haven't been "discovered" yet. Or worse, the super-egos who constantly tout how wonderful their utterly mediocre their software is.

This is the underlying problem with holding out hope for getting paid in open source. The chances are about as good as a slot machine in Reno of paying off big. You can do better getting a corporate coding job and learning how to invest and save properly, than you're likely to ever make in open source.

Re:You make a good point...

[ffflala]

You should dig up information on the consultant. You cannot afford to lack critical analysis skills.
Simply put, that means don't take what you're told (or what you read) at face value. Look up the source of the information and evaluate their reliability, and the authority of their sources.

Anyone can just make crap up. If they think they're right, they'll probably sound fairly convincing.

Re:You make a good point...

[1lus10n]

You forgot Sun, IBM, Oracle and almost every other shop not named microsoft. Hell even the freaking government has people contributing.

Now why dont you tell me how many closed source companies produce crap and go out of business (most) ?

The same amount of closed source fails as open source. Its just a lot easier to be close minded about it when your holed up in your corporate bubble writing crap code that nobody will ever see or use. Its like being a great author who just happens to be a technical writer for the local project management office. Why bother to aspire to greatness when you can string along mediocrity.

(and in the spirit of the election)
You must be an obama voter !

Re:You make a good point...

[SL Baur]

It is hard for the employee to apply specific knowledge of something like Windows or PhotoShop to another project.

More importantly it's easy for an OSS programmer to apply what he knows about the Linux kernel from one job to his next job where the Linux kernel is the topic of programing work.

Knowledge of how to deal with specific applications (and in some sense O/Ses qualify) is always more limited than knowing how things are really done in a specific environment and being able to both diagnose and fix failure and write new code in said environment.

The former, with limited knowledge can always be outsourced to somewhere where wages are less and increase profit. The latter, cannot.

If you get a job paying $X (gross of taxes, net of pretax allowed benefits) that costs your employer $X+government overhead+company overhead[1], your employer expects in return at least $X+government overhead+company overhead of value from your labor.

[1] Basic cost accounting 101. The government requires matching employer payents on certains taxes. You require space for your work area and resources made available to do your work. None of this grows on trees, though some Presidential candidates in the US may imply they do.

Re:You make a good point...

[NateTech]

Those companies don't have a MAJORITY of their coders working on open-source projects, other than Sun perhaps, and they're just completely mismanaged. Seen their stock or their earnings lately? Hell, seen their products lately? Ugh. Crap. (And I hate to say it since they're just down the road from my workplace. Buying StorageTek? WTF? CEO writes "blogs" instead of running the company? Give me a break... we've used their gear in our products for a couple of decades, but we're getting away from it now. They're tanking.)

Show me one of those companies where their real money investment in open-source out-paces their investment in the rest of the company's code or products.

They're just good capitalists. Put a small effort into the open-source community by hiring a few developers and get all the benefits of the code "risk-free".

You'll also notice that their REAL money-makers aren't the things they contribute to. Put a guy on the kernel team, you're just hedging your bets to make sure you have a say in where the kernel is going. Leaving the idiots at Sun out of this picture, IBM & Oracle's balance sheets are virtually unaffected by anything they do open-source... other than perhaps Oracle's play to buy MySQL and keep it as mediocre and crappy as possible.

Going on to your comment about closed failing as much as open... yes, I agree with you. The difference is, closed stuff failing is often some guy in his basement who's JUST as unknown as the failing idiots writing bad open-source stuff, but at least there's an upside potential for one of them. If the guy ISN'T an idiot and writes something GREAT, he gets paid in one system... and in the other he MIGHT get paid and maybe the cover of Linux Journal. Which one is more sane?

And for the election... not an Obama voter here. Closed-source = Pure capitalism!

Nah... what bugs me about open-source is its fans that promise stuff it simply can't deliver. It's been how many years that a cohesive "works so well we all use it" desktop still doesn't exist, so the Linux crowd can both seemingly forever say, "We'll take over the desktop market NEXT year!" and also say, "Because we have so much CHOICE, we understand the desktop is confusing to many people."

Gee, ya think?

Get some standards... get a goal... get a JOB... compete in the real world where people choose to spend real capital on goods. Even Linus has had real jobs. And RMS is living in a world of tenure and forever paychecks that most of us will realistically NEVER see.

(Oh I'm sure that'll get me modded down to whatever lovely negative number Slashdot now allows, and get all sorts of open-source fans who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag to hammer me in replies now... oh well! Don't care.)

Re:You make a good point...

[NateTech]

p.s. I've NEVER seen corporate management allow coders to write things that won't see the light of day. I really have no idea where that's coming from. At least not around our shop... or any of the other's I've worked at.

Engineers might be pulled from a cancelled project, but that's usually a BUSINESS decision about the product's traction during initial demos, but even in those cases... they usually end up re-using much of the original code after they start "morphing" the product to something else the customers might want.

In the case of mature already-on-the-market products, all engineering managers seem to ever do is LOWER the number of resources working on them in "continuation" mode, meaning that every single bugfix or line of code written to add/change a feature is almost always used.

Again, at least around my shop... that's the way it works. No fancy "pair programming", no crazy new ideas on how to change the whole philosophy of how code is written or "fad" cultural changes happen... just engineers assigned tasks that are headed toward a final product, working off as good of a specification as the team could write, while still planning to release on-time.

That's how it goes around here... with all the usual management, motivation, product, and other problems introduced every day... otherwise known as "doing business".

Re:You make a good point...

[Roebot]

That consultant is a moron. In fact, when software companies hire having experience contributing to an open source project is a big big plus on your resume'. Moreover, the only way an enterprise software company can compete and be successful in today's marketplace is to employ open source as a development model to create pull for the product.

Re:You make a good point...

[gnud]

Currently, I create simple web sites at work, mostly using wordpress.

I've developed a couple of plugins to implement funcitonality that clients want. Now I'm gonna spend a couple of hours of my spare time to clean out some assumptions from the code, and then I'm gonna release the plugins to the general public. My employer sees the benefit of open source, and understands that by making the plugins publically available (instead of GPL to our clients only), improvements might dribble back.

So, in a sense, I get paid to work on open source software.

Re:You make a good point...

[red1DANIEL]

Fixed it again. Close_Source==Money, Open_Source!=Money My 2 cents here is that community is risky no doubt but when they got it right they can swallow SAP. red1 The ADempiere Project

Re:You make a good point...

[red1DANIEL]

From our community FOSS project in ADempiere which is heavy on java and ERP subject matter, all these stories seems to run true even so in our mountainous project. Particularly this one about 'trade secrets' within the codes. I not only believe that there are none, but much business secrets are actually data or config data that is not in source code but sitting in the Database. Guess it must be an invisible hand of Karma ensuring FOSS lives! red1 ADempiere ERP

Re:You make a good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

For most developers who aren't in that "Grade AAA" "rockstar" class, it seems if you want to make money while writing software, then most of it will come from corporate close-source.

Also, developing software in the corporate world means not writing YOUR code, but writing someone code for someone else's moneymaker with your nose in it.

Where in open source you're writing code for yourself and a community, with possibly your nose in many people's moneymakers. This is because you have to establish your name among the community so your clients will know you are qualified to make money for something that is free (i.e. training, working on it from a corporate world, etc...)

Most developers will be better off working on closed-source if they want to fill their stomachs. In open-source, you have a very small chance at all to make any money. This guy is just lying to you about making money on open source. Its because people do NOT make money on open source (especially a majority of the community) that companies are willing to utilize it. The company doesn't have to even pay the large majority of the developers who do the leg-work writing and testing the software! That's the only reason why they use it. So they DON'T pay you.

They don't have to pay open source communities anything, or just comparably a small amount. Where in close-source, companies pay their developers, so they charge more for their products.

Think about it, open-source is a hobbyist tools, and closed-source is commercial/professional. Only those who are paid to develop open-source are driving its development to compete against commercial solutions. Their priority is to make sure they get free development to do the leg work from the open-source community. It's corporate world, they're not trying to be nice, and if they are it's because they're going to make extra money off of the free-developers that come along with it (which is probably almost all of you). Atleast in the commercial world, you'll see atleast a 45K paycheck, where in open source you'll be lucky to even make minimum wage!

Take my advice, keep open-source for something you do on your spare-time and as a hobby. Otherwise, find a commercial company if you want to get paid.
  Unless you're a part of that "elite" small percentage in open source, you will not make any money, and you will be pitted against a large amount of people.

Making money in open-source is what it's like if all the commercial companies suddenly layed off their development employees and pitted everyone against each other to chose the few to hire.

Consider the alternatives and other commercial solutions, since they allow you to circumvent the political crap involved to even make a dollar with open-source. Only use open source to dabble in.

Open-Source is one of the ugliest versions of the "haves" and the "have nots" when it comes to getting paid in it. Trust me, get a job in commercial development if you need to make money. And keep open-source around so you know how bad it gets when it comes to making money.

Personal crap.

[HungryHobo]

*from the end of the log*

gmc my sisters boyfriend left home leaving a suicide note..
i'm off

Jesus, isn't it bad taste to leave in things like this when you're posting a log to a news site?

Re:Personal crap.

[Cocoa Radix]

Yes, but it's also entertaining. It was almost like a nice reward for reading through to the end of the log! (Nice for me, not for gmc's sister's boyfriend...)

Re:Personal crap.

[larry bagina]

so she's available?

Re:Personal crap.

[corbettw]

Bad taste in IRC? Never heard of such a thing.

Re:Personal crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its just the wrong link in the article. Instead of linking to the release meeting of twiki, where all this happend, it links to the discussion in the fork channel later on.

for the interested, thats the interesing log :

http://twikifork.org/Fork/TWikiReleaseMeeting2008x10x27

Re:Personal crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad taste in IRC? Never heard of such a thing.

You could at least link to the bash.org fork to make the comment more relevant.

Re:Personal crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

shes available... and worth dying over!

captcha: wetness

wtf.. cant make that kinda stuff up. ha

Twiki blows

[SuperBanana]

...at least, the version we used did. Sample problems, just off the top of my head were incompatibilities with Safari, and moronic account "management".

Despite clear evidence that Safari does auth just fine, Twiki wouldn't let any of our Safari users view pages without presenting them with TWO auth requests, and the developers blamed Apple and refused to release a fix into code.

A "reset my password" form would (are you ready?) email the wiki maintainer with a request to reset that user's password.

While it's fast and has a simple file-based structure, it's also one of the worst web apps I've ever seen.

Re:Twiki blows

[rmstar]

indeed. And this without counting the rather bizarre programming model it uses for the Twiki Apps. It probably deserves an entry in the Turing tar pit. *shudder*.

Re:Twiki blows

[Anonymous Coward]

Been using TWiki for a while now and always with Safari; always worked good for me.

Re:Twiki blows

[Ed Avis]

I think the most serious criticism of TWiki is its poor security track record. I used to run a site, until it was compromised by a widespread exploit uploading a PHP file as an attachment, which TWiki then saves in a directory served directly by Apache - so an attacker can upload any program he wants and it runs with privileges of the web server. In my case, it was a rather handy remote administration tool that lets you alter any file on the system (that's writable by Apache) and download the contents of /etc/passwd.

OK, anyone could get caught out by such a mistake, but the response of the TWiki developers does not inspire confidence. They added a blacklist of 'bad file extensions' so that filenames ending .php cannot be uploaded. Of course, this falls into the mistake of 'enumerating badness' and leaves you open to the next magic file extension that the developers hadn't thought of. At least in TWiki 2 the problem has been dealt with properly by using a CGI script to serve attachments, rather than leaving them to the vagaries of Apache's configuration (which is great for a website you maintain yourself, not so good for directories where anyone can upload any file with any name).

It appeared that the TWiki developers' security process was purely reactive - kludging in fixes to exploits as they were discovered - and nobody was auditing the code to discover holes before the bad guys do, or just to clean up bad smells that might or might not lead to an exploit later.

Looking at the TWiki code, it's rather a mess and doesn't seem to take the paranoid precautions you need in Perl when running system() and other interaction with the outside world - precautions particularly needed in a CGI program that's meant to be publicly accessible. I am a keen Perl programmer but TWiki is the kind of code that gives Perl a bad reputation.

That said, in an environment where you trust everybody (like a company webserver accessible only on your network) TWiki is a very handy application. I rather like the grungy way it keeps page content in RCS archives; you can hack up scripts to automatically import your existing static HTML pages into the wiki. But if I were installing a new wiki now I would use something else: preferably the kind of wiki that works by generating a set of static HTML pages and updating them on edits. That seems to have the smallest attack surface and the best performance.

Re:Twiki blows

[ccharles]

I actually really like TWiki. It's been very stable for us, and is super easy to use. Here are some benefits:

• Uses rcs instead of a database in the backend, which simplifies administration and backups
• Access control and permissions are embedded directly into wiki pages ("topics" in TWiki-speak) using the same markup
• Namespaces via "Webs" help to organize content
• Tons of features are shipped by default (e.g. email notifications, WYSIWYG editor, versioned attachments, very flexible access management) and tons more available as plugins (e.g. Topic tagging, collapsable tree-views showing the semantic relationship between topics)
• Pretty by default, though this is very subjective

Re:Twiki blows

[Omnifarious]

It looks like then that they're well on their way to becoming a respected piece of enterprise software.

Re:Twiki blows

[Anonymous Coward]

you really should configure your apache better.

Re:Twiki blows

[Lord Ender]

We switched fro twiki to DekiWiki and are mostly pleased. Deki has a rich-text editor (no wiki mark-up to learn). It also integrates with Active Directory and does other neat enterprisey things.

On the downside, Deki absolutely chokes if you try and cut-n-paste into it from other applications. I hope they fix that. If you switch to Deki, be prepared to fight with formatting a lot, including editing HTML directly to figure out why making one word bold makes the entire paragraph bold.

Re:Twiki blows

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, in an environment where you trust everybody (like a company webserver accessible only on your network)

I'm being nitpicky here but insider attacks are still a proper threat, in fact it's treated as one of the same level as others in some academic institutions that teach IT Security (at least the ones I've experienced, it's probably more if not all).

In a perfect world it's better to just remove the problem than to mitigate risk.

Re:Twiki blows

[Just Some Guy]

you really should configure your apache better.

True, but you should also be able to run a popular web application on something less hardened than an OpenBSD server configured by a paranoid schizophrenic.

Re:Twiki blows

[PeterBrett]

True, but you should also be able to run a popular web application on something less hardened than an OpenBSD server configured by a paranoid schizophrenic.

...but you repeat yourself!

Re:Twiki blows

[dubl-u]

Yeah, I agree.

If you've made software long enough, you can look at software and tell something about the people who make it, and my impression from the early Twiki versions was that the people behind it just couldn't think about things from an end-user perspective. For an inherently social app, that's bizarre.

Further, from the number of bugs and security holes, they clearly weren't very good coders.

This move seems like it falls in the "once a jerk, always a jerk" category.

Re:Twiki blows

[soronthar]

Or you could follow the instructions and use the automated ApacheConfigGenerator in t.o that gives you a tested and secure apache configuration without much effort.

Re:Twiki blows

[jimicus]

A "reset my password" form would (are you ready?) email the wiki maintainer with a request to reset that user's password.

That, you'll be relieved to know, is gone.

While it's fast and has a simple file-based structure, it's also one of the worst web apps I've ever seen.

Fast? I must have missed something.

It's not a very mature app, however. It's been going a while and it's at version 4, but even minor version changes can mean API upheaval/breakage, version upgrading is always a game of whack-a-mole in terms of sorting out issues and it delegates features to third-party plugins which should have been made part of the core functionality several years ago.

Re:Twiki blows

[rjstanford]

Wow. That eerily mirrors my experience with MS Word - to the point that I got in the habit (on Windows) of pasting everything through Notepad to remove formatting rather than risk accidentally hitting Paste instead of PasteSpecial and slightly screwing up the format of the remainder of the document. Pasting from a browser was the absolute worst thing, IIRC, and could easily get you into situations like the random section-not-ending properly issue, or a phantom blank page showing up unexpectedly.

Shudder... such memories... Still, if it didn't hurt Word, it probably won't hurt Deki.

Re:Twiki blows

[pbhj]

If you switch to Deki, be prepared to fight with formatting a lot, including editing HTML directly to figure out why making one word bold makes the entire paragraph bold.

Sounds like MS Word last time I used it (quite a few years ago admittedly).

Re:Twiki blows

[vldmr_krn]

the mistake of 'enumerating badness'

Word.

That seems to have the smallest attack surface

Where could one read more concepts like these?

Re:Twiki blows

[matija]

I admin a Twiki instalation for a number of teams in a multi-national company. I haven't run into the Safari issue (but then, most of our users don't have Macs). However, what you wrote about the change password page is simply untrue.

Re:Twiki blows

[Anonymous Coward]

from the forkin' irclog:

MichaelDaum well Peter just installed TopicCreatePlugin this morning. which is kind of well insecure: using backticks with user strings inside.
no reason to keep that on twiki-security mailing list anymore [22:43]
gmc MichaelDaum: doesn't perl barf on that? [22:43]
OliverKrueger Wolf_Marbach: hehe, true. Its way to old... [22:43]
MichaelDaum gmc, not the way this code is written. [22:43]
[]
MichaelDaum he untaints the string in an attempt to separate web and topic names. which makes it non-sub-webish. [22:44]
gmc $arg=~/^(.*)$/; $arg=$1; # TODO: properly untaint this :) [22:44]
L

seems twiki.net keeps true to that security policy described by parent

Re:Twiki blows

[Anonymous Coward]

We found that it was the twiki server trying to authenticate from a slow auth. server. We replaced the auth. server with our own MySQL authenticator, and wrote a bit of code that allows the same uname and passwd for our twikis and mantis etc. Just one screen and a bunch of tick boxes where one can add a user, tick the boxes corresponding to the feature you want to grant r or rw access to, and that is it. The user is emailed an random password, and instructions on how to change it. One can do that with open source.

Re:Twiki blows

[Anonymous Coward]

This uploading of PHP files was tried on us, it was thwarted by blocked outgoing ports.

What the hell?

[mewshi_nya]

If you have a community, you don't piss them off like this, for exactly this reason. They will kill you in the press.

Every project that goes commercial (MySQL, I'm looking at you) has a heritage of open source. By killing off the community that created it, they are going to kill off their commercial prospects.

Re:What the hell?

[fm6]

Since Day One, Theony has been looking to cash in on TWiki. That's motivated a lot of dumb moves on his part — this last nonsense being one of many.

Actually, the big problem is not so much Theony's desire to be the next Red Hat as the boneheaded way he goes about it. He wants to sell TWiki as an "enterprise collaboration platform" despite the existence of many existing products in that customers space. Most of them are more powerful and easy to customize than TWiki, and many of them are open source.

The main result is that when you install a TWiki, your default pages are full of arcane markup designed to support these "Enterprise" features. When I installed my department TWiki, I spend a lot of time stripping out this crap, to avoid confusing my non-nerd users.

The current version also makes a new WYSIWYG editor the default — and hardwires it into the system in numerous places. Unfortunately, the editor is very buggy, with many formatting errors and frequent data loses. You can just disable the WYSIWYG plugin, but some of my users still prefer it. So I ended up enabling it and then carefully hacking the many places in TWiki where it assumes that you want the WYSIWYG editor, even if you say you don't.

Despite these clumsy attempts to support "Enterprises collaboration" TWiki has been notably deficient in the features an enterprise would look for, such as time zone support, use of a DBMS as a back end, a stable API, and a practical query language.

This last deficit was actually remedied in 4.2, which is one reason I upgraded. But the main reason was LDAP-over-SSL support, another enterprise feature TWiki only recently acquired — and which the company I work for requires me to have. Unfortunately, this version includes a major refactoring of the user authentication API. Not a bad thing in itself (and probably necessary for the LDAP thing), but it eliminated the object used to encapsulate user information! Not surprisingly, a bunch of plugins have been broken by this change.

If I ever have occasion to install another wiki, it won't be TWiki. I'll take the time to educate myself about one that still understands that wikis are about keeping things simple. That doesn't mean the software itself isn't complex, just that the complexity is hidden from the end users, and is structured in such a way that administrators and developers don't have to cope with a lot of spaghetti logic.

Re:What the hell?

[hotdiggitydawg]

Every project that goes commercial (MySQL, I'm looking at you) has a heritage of open source. By killing off the community that created it, they are going to kill off their commercial prospects.

Yeah - nobody uses MySQL anymore. You tell 'em!

Re:What the hell?

[mewshi_nya]

Um... Thing is, I can still contribute to MySQL if I so choose. I'm not locked out of anything. Hell, if I choose to install amaroK, I can even install MySQL to complement it.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually worked for a company that hired Peter and I have sat across the table from him before and talked about TWiki (billable hours for us both, actually). I never had a huge problem with TWiki, it just isn't slick like MediaWiki. It's also extremely slow**. But the main product was TWiki.com, the "Structured Wiki". A lot of that is custom code built for your company to make a real structured wiki. Unfortunately that takes a lot of time and money. The really useful wiki's always take time, and participation, and people who care. Most of his presentation was about finding a person in the company to "champion" the wiki, and constantly tout it's usefulness, and add starter Wiki's and stuff. And of course, the whole "structured" concept involves a sort of workflow and approval process for changes. I got pretty far with it, including LDAP/Kerberos integration (using mod_auth_kerb), but in the end the company decided to go with the equally free (*if you already have a bunch of Windows 2003 servers) Windows Sharepoint Services.

**It was extremely slow because it used flat files for the data storage and actual GNU diffs for the revisions. Not a bad plan, except that you are running in shell land and most filesystems aren't going to be more efficient than a nice DBMS. Maybe if you put the whole thing in a RAM disk, but you still aren't getting good indexing.

Will Sun take back their servers?

[otis wildflower]

After RTFA it appears that Sun donated a few servers to host twiki.. Will they be taking them back now that the arrangement has changed (or will the venture folks end up paying for them)?

Either way, pretty stupid way of doing things, worse than XFree86 even, especially for a GPL project...

Welcome to the new economy

[Bill_the_Engineer]

With less money to throw around, VCs will expect some immediate payoff for any investment they make in a project.

I hate to sound like a troll, but it looks like we may see the end of a marriage between what we believe an open source projects should look like and the venture capitalists that fund them.

I still think open source will continue to thrive in the government/academic markets. It's just experiencing a little push back from commercial capital...

Re:Welcome to the new economy

[zaliv]

A clarification: TWiki has never received any funding, let alone by a venture capitalist. This has been a takeover out of the blue.

Re:Welcome to the new economy

[heikkile]

I hate to sound like a troll, but it looks like we may see the end of a marriage between what we believe an open source projects should look like and the venture capitalists that fund them.

Not all Open Source projects are funded by venture capital! I work for a small company that has several Open Source projects out there, and has never had outside capital. We've had our bad times, but at the moment we are expanding slowly, and the future does not look too bad.

(And yes, we use Twiki internally, and I got the "relaunch" mail. Sounded like they wanted "strong branding" that was "not compatible with Debian". Pity, but if that is the way it goes, I will need to find another Wiki system for us, and probably convert all our data - won't let any single application dictate what distro I should use. )

Re:Welcome to the new economy

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to sound like a troll, but it looks like we may see the end of a marriage between what we believe an open source projects should look like and the venture capitalists that fund them.

Dude, it's *one* project, with a "business" run by *two* stupid suckers.

Hardly the end. Just a ripple.

Re:Welcome to the new economy

[OliverKrueger]

As far as I understand Peter Thoenys comments on Debian, this was related to the governance model of the Debian project. To cite Tom Barton (ceo of twiki.net): "TWiki is not ready for a democratic approach."

Technically the software formerly known as TWiki is very well compatible with Debian. Sven Dowideit for example puts alot of effort into the maintance of deb packages.

Re:Welcome to the new economy

[Bill_the_Engineer]

TWiki has never received any funding, let alone by a venture capitalist.

Sorry, I was confused by the summary which called twiki.net a startup and states (emphasis mine):

Is it a sensible move for a venture capital firm that depends on a healthy Open Source community to lock it out?"

My comment was an answer to the question asked within the summary...

Re:Welcome to the new economy

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Not all Open Source projects are funded by venture capital!

I understand this, I was answering the question given in the summary:

Is it a sensible move for a venture capital firm that depends on a healthy Open Source community to lock it out?

My comment was for the relationship between VCs and OSS, not for all OSS. Basically if an OSS project needed external funding, governmental/academic sources should remain stable despite the reluctance for long-term funding from commercial capital.

Sorry for the confusion.

ow

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please fix the broken URL in my attribution for this story? Thanks :-)

Re:ow

[AndrewNeo]

Sorry but that AC right above you asked for it first!

ow

[David Gerard]

Could you please fix the broken URL in my attribution for this story? Thanks! :-)

Wrong logs

[nuddlegg]

The logs in the posting above are not so interesting. If you need the logs of the way this was communicated to the TWiki community then have a look at http://twikifork.org/pub/Fork/TWikiReleaseMeeting2008x10x27/twiki_release_2008_10_27.log

Re:Wrong logs

[u38cg]

--- Log opened Mon Oct 27 17:55:35 2008
17:55 -!- gmc [n=gmc@freenode/sponsor/gmc] has joined #twiki_release
17:55 -!- Irssi: #twiki_release: Total of 7 nicks [0 ops, 0 halfops, 0 voices, 7 normal]
17:55 -!- Irssi: Join to #twiki_release was synced in 0 secs
19:02 -!- CDot1 [n=crawford@crawfordcurrie.plus.com] has joined #twiki_release
19:03 -!- CDot1 changed the topic of #twiki_release to: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/GeorgetownReleaseMeeting2008x10x27
19:34 -!- FranzJosefGigler [n=chatzill@chello084115142036.6.graz.surfer.at] has joined #twiki_release
19:45 -!- FranzJosefGigler [n=chatzill@chello084115142036.6.graz.surfer.at] has left #twiki_release []
19:45 -!- EugenMayer [n=EugenMay@dslb-092-074-254-018.pools.arcor-ip.net] has joined #twiki_release
19:45 Hello
19:46 CDot1: are you arround?
19:48 What time is it in London?
19:49 19:42 i guess
19:49 its 20:42 in .nl
19:49 so it starts in 10min?
19:49 think so yes.. but we just had wintertime.. so it might all be a mess.. lets check the world clock
19:49 i believe cdot is having dinner atm btw
19:50 daylight saving just changed here, too. Thats why Im asking. :)
19:51 ah.. ntpd was not running.. it's 8:51 here :)
19:52 7 mins,... gone forever... ;)
19:52 19:51 in london indeed, according to the/a world clock
19:52 -!- TomBarton [n=TomBarto@63.146.69.17] has joined #twiki_release
19:54 Hi Tom
19:55 Hi Marcus
19:55 Hi Tom.
19:55 Hello
19:57 So the meating starts in some minutes or am i wrong?
19:58 you're not wrong, unless i am too
19:58 -!- Lavr_ [n=donotlik@cpe.atm2-0-103309.0x3ef3d076.albnxx13.customer.tele.dk] has joined #twiki_release
19:58 i used the "meating" word again
19:58 -!- SopanShewale [n=chatzill@123.252.224.74] has joined #twiki_release
19:59 :)
19:59 hi andre, crawford, eugen, koen, kenneth, oliver, sopan, sven, tom, markus
19:59 i mean, whats wrong? it sounds the same :)
19:59 Hi Peter
19:59 Hi Peter.
19:59 who is actually at the keyboard?
19:59 Kenneth is
19:59 * gmc Markus is set to "away".
20:00 so as CDot
20:00 i'll be mostly in lurking mode though, i've caught a bug again
20:01 Im busy with some kinosearch issues, too. Please shout, if you want me to comment on something.
20:01 -!- will_t1 [n=wii_t1@63.146.69.17] has joined #twiki_release
20:01 hi will
20:02 who will be facilitating? who will be taking notes?
20:03 proposed agenda items are posted at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/GeorgetownReleaseMeeting2008x10x27
20:03 # 1. Review Urgent Bugs - for TWiki 4.2.4
20:03 # 2. Feature requests for Georgetown Release
20:03 i would like to start with a new agenda item
20:03 ---++ Relaunch TWiki.org Project
20:04 http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/RelaunchTWikiOrgProject
20:04 please review, i also sent this content to twiki-dev and twiki-announce
20:05 Did you change the default skin?
20:05 yes
20:05 that is one of the changes
20:05 looks a lot better. Not perfect, but years better.
20:06 once arthur's twiki.org specific skin is ready we can change it to his
20:07 -!- MichaelDaum__ [n=micha@dslb-082-083-134-003.pools.arcor-ip.net] has joined #twiki_release
20:07 PeterThoeny_: just to get one point, t.n. is not heading to follow the debian licence model for projects, because there are believes, the trademark can then not be protected by t.n?
20:08 just one question peter, this is it now? either go with t.n or not?
20:08 Are there any news related to the "negotiations" between t.n. and "us"?
20:08 here now; was eating supper, sorry
20:08 Hi CDot.
20:09 hi crawfo

Re:Wrong logs

[u38cg]

Sorry, last post ate the nicks. Try again:

--- Log opened Mon Oct 27 17:55:35 2008
17:55 -!- gmc [n=gmc@freenode/sponsor/gmc] has joined #twiki_release
17:55 -!- Irssi: #twiki_release: Total of 7 nicks [0 ops, 0 halfops, 0 voices, 7 normal]
17:55 -!- Irssi: Join to #twiki_release was synced in 0 secs
19:02 -!- CDot1 [n=crawford@crawfordcurrie.plus.com] has joined #twiki_release
19:03 -!- CDot1 changed the topic of #twiki_release to: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/GeorgetownReleaseMeeting2008x10x27
19:34 -!- FranzJosefGigler [n=chatzill@chello084115142036.6.graz.surfer.at] has joined #twiki_release
19:45 -!- FranzJosefGigler [n=chatzill@chello084115142036.6.graz.surfer.at] has left #twiki_release []
19:45 -!- EugenMayer [n=EugenMay@dslb-092-074-254-018.pools.arcor-ip.net] has joined #twiki_release
19:45 < EugenMayer> Hello
19:46 < EugenMayer> CDot1: are you arround?
19:48 < OliverKrueger> What time is it in London?
19:49 < gmc> 19:42 i guess
19:49 < gmc> its 20:42 in .nl
19:49 < OliverKrueger> so it starts in 10min?
19:49 < gmc> think so yes.. but we just had wintertime.. so it might all be a mess.. lets check the world clock
19:49 < gmc> i believe cdot is having dinner atm btw
19:50 < OliverKrueger> daylight saving just changed here, too. Thats why Im asking. :)
19:51 < gmc> ah.. ntpd was not running.. it's 8:51 here :)
19:52 < OliverKrueger> 7 mins,... gone forever... ;)
19:52 < gmc> 19:51 in london indeed, according to the/a world clock
19:52 -!- TomBarton [n=TomBarto@63.146.69.17] has joined #twiki_release
19:54 < EugenMayer> Hi Tom
19:55 < EugenMayer> Hi Marcus
19:55 < OliverKrueger> Hi Tom.
19:55 < TomBarton> Hello
19:57 < EugenMayer> So the meating starts in some minutes or am i wrong?
19:58 < gmc> you're not wrong, unless i am too
19:58 -!- Lavr_ [n=donotlik@cpe.atm2-0-103309.0x3ef3d076.albnxx13.customer.tele.dk] has joined #twiki_release
19:58 < EugenMayer> i used the "meating" word again
19:58 -!- SopanShewale [n=chatzill@123.252.224.74] has joined #twiki_release
19:59 < gmc> :)
19:59 < PeterThoeny_> hi andre, crawford, eugen, koen, kenneth, oliver, sopan, sven, tom, markus
19:59 < EugenMayer> i mean, whats wrong? it sounds the same :)
19:59 < EugenMayer> Hi Peter
19:59 < OliverKrueger> Hi Peter.
19:59 < PeterThoeny_> who is actually at the keyboard?
19:59 < Lavr_> Kenneth is
19:59 * gmc <==
19:59 < OliverKrueger> Markus is set to "away".
20:00 < OliverKrueger> so as CDot
20:00 < gmc> i'll be mostly in lurking mode though, i've caught a bug again
20:01 < OliverKrueger> Im busy with some kinosearch issues, too. Please shout, if you want me to comment on something.
20:01 -!- will_t1 [n=wii_t1@63.146.69.17] has joined #twiki_release
20:01 < PeterThoeny_> hi will
20:02 < PeterThoeny_> who will be facilitating? who will be taking notes?
20:03 < PeterThoeny_> proposed agenda items are posted at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/GeorgetownReleaseMeeting2008x10x27
20:03 < PeterThoeny_> # 1. Review Urgent Bugs - for TWiki 4.2.4
20:03 < PeterThoeny_> # 2. Feature requests for Georgetown Release
20:03 < PeterThoeny_> i would like to start with a new agenda item
20:03 < PeterThoeny_> ---++ Relaunch TWiki.org Project
20:04 < PeterThoeny_> http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/RelaunchTWikiOrgProject
20:04 < PeterThoeny_> please review, i also sent this content to twiki-dev and twiki-announce
20:05 < OliverKrueger> Did you change the default skin?
20:05 < PeterThoeny_> yes
20:05 < PeterThoeny_> that is one of the changes
20:05 < EugenMayer> looks a lot better. Not perfect, but years be

Re:Wrong logs

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

was the link posted by GP not sufficient?

Re:Wrong logs

[u38cg]

There was a time on /. (before tabbed browsing) when the entire contents of TFA would show up in the first few comments, obviating the tedious necessity of clicking a link. I miss those days.

Theony will just alienate himself.

[DragonTHC]

He believes it's his project.

It is not.

It belongs to the mass of developers who contributed to it.

Happily they forked the codebase.

Sadly for Theony, no one will continue using Twiki. His actions are just bad for open source software.

Re:Theony will just alienate himself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly for Theony, no one will continue using Twiki. His actions are just bad for open source software.

I think his actions are good for Free Software. He just removed one bad apple. (himself)

Re:Theony will just alienate himself.

[fm6]

You're making two big assumptions that don't quite work.

First, you're assuming that the fork will become an established product. Possible, but not certain. To survive, an OS project needs leadership — somebody who's willing to take a lot of time to do all the boring administration stuff that keeps any software project moving forward. From what I know about the people involved in the fork, none of them fits the bill. They all have day jobs that have little or nothing to do with TWiki. They just contribute bits and pieces of code in their spare time. Unless somebody emerges to fill the leadership role, this fork is just going to sputter and die — as most forks do.

Second, you're assuming that most of TWiki's users will immediately abandon TWiki and move to the new product. Speaking as a TWiki user, I can tell you that's not going to happen. We use TWiki to maintain corporate applications that have to be reliably available. We can't afford to shift to an unproven new product, even if it uses the same code base. Most users will take a wait-and-see attitude, and maybe shift once the fork proves itself.

Here are possible outcomes, in rough order of probability.

• Both TWiki and the fork wither and die, TWiki from a lack of contributers, the fork from a lack of leadership. That's kind of a pain for those of us who use TWiki, but it's not the end of the world. There are a huge number of OS wiki products. Retooling to use one of them is something I would avoid as long as possible, but which might well pay dividends in the long run, since TWiki is not that great a piece of software.
• Theony's VC partners give him money to hire paid help, and that keeps TWiki alive. How good that is for TWiki users depends on how much they restrict the new code. Most of us just can't afford to pay for this kind of software, so if key features become proprietary, we'll jump ship — maybe to the fork, but more likely to another wiki.
• TWiki dies and the fork takes its place. Easiest for users like me (though not necessarily the best outcome!), but extremely unlikely.

Re:Theony will just alienate himself.

[Anonymous Coward]

We can't afford to shift to an unproven new product

As the wiki expert in big corporate which my ethics don't let me name since they wouldn't approve I've already declared that twiki is the "new" product and NextWiki is the continuation. I suspect our sister companies will follow. There's a simple story here. Twiki is a trademark and only one person can use it commercially. We use our wikis commercially and "respect" IP. We will move away from twiki for legal safety. Fast.

Re:Theony will just alienate himself.

[rmstar]

Well, the community around Twiki has been terminally dysfunctional for a long, long time. Two years ago, the Twiki community were already having pretty much the same problems. It looked a lot like those codependent love-hate relationships but on a much larger scale. People got offended, left, came back, big reconciliations happened, along acts of valor and honor, and factions formed, meetings happened, and on and on and on. I guess it was/is pretty interesting for people who are into that kind of thing. It made me cringe. I followed the shit for about a month out of a mixture of pure morbid interest and actual disbelief.

Diagnosis: without that abusive guy on top, the whole thing would have stopped working years ago.

So if I may venture a prediction, they will again have some dramatic meetings, Thoeny will (pretend to?) have some epiphany, the community will try with some success to find again some trust in him (which all will be SO FUCKING IMPORTANT!), and for a while it will look like all things have finally changed for the better, so much so that Darfour and the banking crisis can be safely ignored, I guess. But god forbid, that would moot the point of the project, so let's start some infighting, etc, etc, etc, and on and on and on and on it will go. With a bit of luck, the participants in that mass sado-maso orgy will manage to avoid doing something stupid that may land them in jail. But any way this goes, Twiki will continue to be developed by the very same people.

Which is a pitty, because, well, Twiki sucks, actually.

Re:Theony will just alienate himself.

[darkwhite]

TWiki is in pretty widespread use. It's not going to go dead, and the developers who got kicked out will now have serious goodwill from distribution packagers who take note of what's happening.

I will be very surprised if this whole thing results in anything but the complete failure of Theony's little enterprise and straightforward replacement of TWiki with the fork.

Re:Theony will just alienate himself.

[fm6]

Your equation is ActiveDevelopers + LargeUserbase = Success.

But as I've already said, a successful software project also needs leadership. I've seen many projects, both open source and proprietary, fall apart because nobody's doing the boring scutwork: fixing bugs, integrating changes, documenting stuff. Left to themselves, developers will spend all their time implementing kewl new features and ignoring the necessary scutwork.

I agree that the Theony's enterprise will probably go nowhere. But that's no guarantee that the fork group will inherit all of TWiki's users. As a TWiki implementor and admin, I already had a lot of issues with the software even before this crisis. To gain my loyalty, the fork would have to not just recreate all the functionality of TWiki, but actually deal with its many problems. Otherwise the next time I need a major functionality upgrade, I'll bite the bullet and move to a new platform. It's not like I don't have a lot of options.

Re:Theony will just alienate himself.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to agree to the assertion that a leader is paramount in administering a community FOSS project, since i myself am one in the ADempiere Project, but i like to differ on the following counts:

1) A bazaar project as opposed to a cathedral one (Twiki just became one high-priest temple with lots of silent prayers there), it will attract the mobs, i.e. more and more contributors, which by natural causes and the law of averages, will produce administrators due to the necessity itself. I find this happening many times in ADempiere. We needed a wiki or irc chatroom or manuals or conferences or business and we got all that, though in very chaotic and anarchic forms. We do not even know where our next meal is coming from, but it does somehow by magic.

So i say, 'Trust the mob, and karma'.

2) Administration work is minimal outside the trunk. And the trunk is 99.999% what software is all about. The down side to such a mob is that no one cleans the trash and wipe the drapes. Thus you find a rather dirty looking www.adempiere.org and unkempt www.adempiere.com but look at our SVNlogs and you be amazed. Very matrix-like synchrocity and monstrous progress in terms of software and subject matter prowess that sure beats the hell out of SAP. And an added bonus is materials here www.adempiere.com/wiki/

My advice would be to be very conversational and open in the forums and have lots of parties. It sure attracts the nice chicks sooner than later.

red1

Re:Theony will just alienate himself.

[red1DANIEL]

Shocked that i am called an Anon Coward, l created an account and sign here :> red1

Depended, past tense

[Sockatume]

Now the really hard, expensive part of development is done, the open source community is no longer needed. Now corporate drones can be hired to fix bugs and run the program into the ground with ill-executed new functionality.

Re:Depended, past tense

[JasterBobaMereel]

Meanwhile the fork maintained by the bulk of the original developers (the community) will carry on under a different name while the original will be shunned and will wither and die ...

Re:Depended, past tense

[Anonymous Coward]

Functionality nobody will buy.

Re:Depended, past tense

[MarkvW]

Sounds like somebody who married a person in medical school, then got dumped when the doctor's practice was established.

Same old story . . .

Re:Depended, past tense

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm.. I think it's just about ready for Computer Associates to buy it.

Long Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Another strategy is to never let the "community" in. Look at Alfresco. They get lots of press and kudos for being open source, but are very protective of their code and don't let contributors in. But they keep the "community" gathered outside their gates because they've never done anything to alienate them. They just started out as somewhat hostile and will never get flak for staying that way.

They only other similarly managed project that pops to mind for me right now is Liferay.

Re:Long Answer

[mabhatter654]

That's probably the point. VC's like to see that they "own" an interest in everything. Some lawyer probably wanted them to pull the access or not get funding to protect their new "property". Of course the company was only worth while because of the community. That's what the IP lawyer types always miss. The contributed code may or may not be assigned to the site owner so just pulling contributor access is not enough. If they've cut off contributors they have all sorts other problems starting with not being able to change and redistribute under anything less than open source licenses without express permission of ALL the Contributors... which are locked out...

New T&C's make no sense.

[Hozza]

In the new T&C's for the "relaunched" Twiki it includes the following:

Derivative works

All GPLed content can of course be freely be redistributed and copied, as long as the TWiki trademark rights are maintained.

TWiki.org website content contributed by an individual is copyrighted by the contributing author. The collective work of the TWiki.org website is copyrighted by TWiki.org and may not be copied without written approval from the TWiki Community Council.

Are those 2 conditions even legal?

Re:New T&C's make no sense.

[mea37]

"Are those 2 conditions even legal?"

I don't see anything illegal about them, but can you elaborate on why you think they may not be?

Re:New T&C's make no sense.

[rtfa-troll]

as long as the TWiki trademark rights are maintained.

that's probably an additional restriction on redistribution and means that twiki.net no longer has a license to the GPL code for which they were not the author. Given the rather strict clauses in the GPLv2, mere distribution of twiki by twiki.net is something where I would want to discuss legality with a GPL expert lawyer who was intimately aware of the history of the twiki code.

Question assumes the answer

[DragonWriter]

Is it a sensible move for a venture capital firm that depends on a healthy Open Source community to lock it out?

Of course, the question presumes the answer. If, in fact, the VC firm depends on a healthy Open Source community, it shouldn't lock it out. The real question is does the VC firm (or, as I think would more accurately state the case here, the VC-funded firm) actually rely on that, or is it viable for them to operate without it?

Re:Question assumes the answer

[zaliv]

We are seeing the trend that large organizations that want to employ a collaboration platform are informing themselves on the health and working of the community. So: no, it is not viable without a healthy community.

set up .wiki

[rs79]

Make it a tld. Post the nameservers here. That is if it's a usefull tool. If you jsut want to speculate on the names the line forms at the right over by the icann booth.

irc log

[Anonymous Coward]

MayerEugen what the hell is wrong with the VI under freebsd.. [23:57]
*** sayotte joined the channel [23:57]
sayotte sayotte groans [23:58]
uebera|| MayerEugen: emacs is your friend... :p [23:58]
MayerEugen emacs is not my friend at all. !!!! [23:58]
uebera|| Ah, I see... you're one of "them"... ;)

They cut if off just when it was getting good...

Serious issues with this project

[rapiddescent]

I was in the market for a wiki engine for a top-100 UK company. It seemed, during the investigation phase, that twiki was too good to be true - until we found that the founder and main contributor polluted just about every forum with "use twiki" messages whether it was sensible or not. It met our shortlist and so we installed it, but, it didn't meet our criteria on usability, administration and we found it to be quite slow. I think the 'founder' had raised expectations a little too high on all those forums he posted to...

Certainly, we now have an open source policy that looks into the organisation of the hosting project to look out for these sorts of shenanigans before we use it. Certainly, I think the twiki situation is more about the personality of the 'founder' than anything and I would steer clear of a project that is behaving like this until the project board are more stabilised. it's happened before, and it will happen again.

We went with mediawiki and its been a real success and culture changing event for the organisation - encouraging some of the staff to send in fixes and create extensions to be shared with the community. The success of mediawiki software and the mediawiki project as a whole has now opened up the discussion on Linux, JBoss and other open source platforms in this once closed-source-only organisation.

Re:Serious issues with this project

[fm6]

Your issues with TWiki are pretty consistent with my negative experiences. That said, I'm a little surprised that you chose MediaWiki instead. Its feature set seems to be very limited. No fine-tuning user access, no support for external authentication, not easy to add new markup. Of course, these aren't deal breakers for everybody.

Did you consider any other wikis? There are a lot of choices.

Re:Serious issues with this project

[rapiddescent]

I found the extensions very useful: I used a slightly modified LDAP Extension to integrate with the MS Active Directory used here (in a non-standard way).

yes looked at some commercial wikis (like confluence) and J2EE based options. A big plus for mediawiki is that most users are familiar with wikipedia even if they haven't ever contributed to it. For thos evaluating, I found wikimatrix a useful place to start - although, paper exercises are no subsitute to trying the stuff out.

Re:Serious issues with this project

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

No fine-tuning user access, no support for external authentication

MediaWiki supports both of these. The first is the userrights array, which you can configure in LocalSettings.php, and groups configured in the usergroup table. The second is by subclassing AuthPlugin.php and telling it exactly what you want — autocreate local users? create remote users? fetch a password db or authenticate externally? replace the login and logout pages?

Most decent external authentication providers set REMOTE_USER, and meta has a plugin for autologin with REMOTE_USER.

not easy to add new markup

I haven't had a reason to try this, so I don't know. But you can make pseudomarkup really easily via the template feature, e.g., map {{{serif|foo}}} to <font face="my favorite serif font">foo</font>, or whatever. In fact, templates are how Wikipedia does their infoboxes (the tables on the right side of articles about prominent public figures or businesses or whatever).

Re:Serious issues with this project

[fm6]

I stand corrected. I'll have to pay closer attention to MediaWiki next time I need to choose a wiki to implement.

Go With The Flow Or Don't

[DynaSoar]

"Is it a sensible move for a venture capital firm that depends on a healthy Open Source community to lock it out?"

They didn't. TFA states several moved to the new project with the VC. Since there's a backer, they should be able to say what they support. If they wish to change, they can. If others want to change with them, they can, and have. If others don't want to, simply because the backer closed the old project, they don't have to. They don't have to grow up and accept the fact they'd been participating in a VC funded project either. But both would be beneficial. Nothing is stopping the others from continuing the old project unfunded except wasting time whining about it.

Mambo/Joomla anyone?

[Qbertino]

Rule Number 1: NEVER get pissy with the majority of main core contributers. If the project has *any* significance at all, you WILL lose. And for very good reasons (and riddance) too. That's a fact. Learn it.

Poor decision...

[mr.dreadful]

This happened a few years ago with Mambo. The company that started Mambo alienated the development community and the developers all left and started Joomla. Today Joomla seems much more robust and viable then Mambo. Twiki.net has a poor road in front of it...

Cheeky (slightly off topic/topic hijack...)

[shic]

I've recently been fiddling with Twiki, and looking at structured wikis in general.

I've been looking at ways to build collaborated structured data... where the structure of the data (i.e. the sort of fields that need to be filled in) evolves over time - and where some form of editorial control can allow the reliability of data to improve over time... or, at least, allow several people to come to agree on the same false data.

I've not been getting very far very quickly - though Drupal is showing some promise. Have other Slashdotters tried to address this problem? What software did you find most useful?

To put it back on topic, if the TWiki team go off to build the structured collaborative tool I hoped TWiki would be from the outset... I'm in favour of whatever restrictions they see fit.

Re:Cheeky (slightly off topic/topic hijack...)

[Sharkeys-Day]

I've looked into structured wikis as well. Most are rather disappointing in what they consider structure. (Twiki is a good example of this.) Jotspot seemed to be doing it right, but google bought them and removed all the useful features, and they were not open source either.

So I've resorted to writing my own structured wiki. It's still in its infancy, but I'm using it as a web development platform.

I would also like to see semi-structured databases get popular, because they would work really well behind a structured wiki. For now, I'm using a full-text search engine which supports fields (Lucene) to do structured searches in my wiki.

You'll find no work then

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would someone take YOU on when they don't know you from Adam?

If you've had a large role in writing a driver for Exchange working with Evolution, they'll know you're the doberman's doobries.

Re:You'll find no work then

[Anonymous Coward]

But part of the problem is fighting your way up the open source ranks into a project which does just that unless you're under corporate sponsorship or you do it yourself or you round up a few buddies...and if it were that easy then Linux would Just Work(TM)

Slimy & Stupid

[Ideally Nowhere]

Reputation is everything when you're not the only player in the game. Really, why would anybody create bad-blood and eliminate their CORE (and free) developer base? It boggles the mind.

Damn

[Anonymous Coward]

Bastards.

Monetizing Open Source

[sbeckstead]

This sounds like a perfectly good way to make money...
The first dose is free...
Then take it closed when it's gotten popular.

Re:Monetizing Open Source

[otis wildflower]

With GPL, that is basically impossible. Granted, if you write the vast majority of the code yourself (and you have copyright of submitted code assigned to you), you can simply choose to update the closed source, but the code out there under GPL will remain GPL.

The only good time to do this...

[Kjella]

...or perhaps less bad time, is if you've written so much of the source you can actually rip out any outside contribution, change the license and go down a different road. If you did then it's your project anyway, and nobody promised you'd keep releasing code forever. This on the other hand, sounds like suicide:

20:37 PeterThoeny_, TomBarton: how will you handle our code when we go away? Will it still be there?
20:38 TomBarton of course! we will continue to fully comply with the GPL etc.

So... this will continue to be a GPL project, which means the new community will be free to take any of the VCs improvements and they'll be fighting a GPL project that has most of the previous developers on board? I think that VC might as well flush those money down a toilet or give them to me, either would be a better use of them.

Re:The only good time to do this...

[Anonymous Coward]

So just to be clear on what's going on.

1) Twiki is a GPL open source project.
2) It was being organized by some team/company and worked on by the same + community.
3) Team/company no longer wants community to work on it.
4) Twiki is still GPL (this cannot be undone). So unless the team/company start from scratch must continue to release source code improvements.
5) Community is free to organize itself and incorporate changes done by team/company if desired.

If this is all true, I don't get it. What's the point of saying "Yeah thanks, but we don't want your help any more" (i.e. #$%^ off.)

Re:The only good time to do this...

[jimicus]

If this is all true, I don't get it. What's the point of saying "Yeah thanks, but we don't want your help any more" (i.e. #$%^ off.)

I imagine the idea is to turn TWiki into a commercial product and sell it.

Can't think who'd want to pay for it though.

Re:The only good time to do this...

[otis wildflower]

4) Twiki is still GPL (this cannot be undone). So unless the team/company start from scratch must continue to release source code improvements.

In theory, all GPL contributions that have not had their copyright given over to the project could be expunged and the remaining product could be cleanly relicensed. Of course, the last GPL version would still be out there, but future revisions would not be.. Didn't Nessus do something like this?

Re:The only good time to do this...

[Anonymous Coward]

That also works in reverse. They could take the open contributions made to the fork and include them.

If I wanted to be an author

[ClosedSource]

I would have majored in creative writing in college. If you don't want to make a living by developing software, why limit yourself to writing books on open source applications? That's going to be a low-volume seller.

In any case, there are a few well-known companies that make money directly from open source software but like diet plans "the results are not typical".

Re:If I wanted to be an author

[Foofoobar]

You are assuming that's ones ONLY source of income again which was the original authors incorrect assumption. Open source is often a 'side income' for most where their main job supplies the majority of income and the open source income supplies a tidy side income; the job supports the open source project of course usually but if it doesn't, the LIST of things (publishing, support, installation, training, etc) are all various ways that open source projects make money... no one singular way.

Again, you have to think like an entrepeneur as every open source project that wants to make money will be doing.

Re:If I wanted to be an author

[ClosedSource]

".. the job supports the open source project of course ..."

That was my point - in general it doesn't. In fact, even if it does, you'd better check the terms of your NDA - you might be violating it by creating your own side business based on software you write at work.

"Again, you have to think like an entrepeneur as every open source project that wants to make money will be doing."

"Thinking like an entrepeneur" doesn't mean scrounging around for a few crumbs without a real business plan.

Re:If I wanted to be an author

[Foofoobar]

Indeed couldn't agree with you more. But most people make it clear on their resumes that they work on an open source project and thats one of the reasons why people hire them; either because they use the project, because the project enabled them to look at the developers code and get a good idea of their skill or because it shows initiative.

Few employers will hire someone working on an open source project without being aware of it unless you start one while on the job and then you do so at your own risk. I have talked to people who have been hired BECAUSE the employer uses their code or project or has tinkered with it. I have yet to see someone who has ever been fired for working on an open source project unless they have tried to start it while on the job and it directly conflicted with the business of the employer.

Re:If I wanted to be an author

[1lus10n]

And the problem with this theory is that closed source software somehow succeeds the majority of the time, or even a large part of the time.

It doesnt. It fails, just like F/OSS.

Get used to failure, with your attitude its going to occur quite a bit in life.

Re:If I wanted to be an author

[ClosedSource]

"And the problem with this theory is that closed source software somehow succeeds the majority of the time, or even a large part of the time."

I'm not saying either of those things. However, I'd hardly be going out on a limb by saying that overall closed source software is more financially successful than open source.

"Get used to failure, with your attitude its going to occur quite a bit in life."

But happily I've at least won this argument with you.

TWIKI

[TomTraynor]

Is it just me or does anyone else remember Buck Rogers from the 70's? The robot character was Twiki... I wonder if that show got a trademark on 'TWIKI' and if so, what would happen to the TWIKI.NET trademark?

Re:TWIKI

[mea37]

"I wonder if that show got a trademark on 'TWIKI' and if so, what would happen to the TWIKI.NET trademark?"

Nothing at all would happen to the TWiki.net trademark. A trademark on a character name in a television show would not be in conflict with a trademark for a piece of software, just like the trademark of a music label is not (generally) in conflict with the trademark for a type of home computer.

Re:TWIKI

[OrangeTide]

My old copy of Twiki had that robot character in the logo. I didn't know what it was when I first saw it and had to look it up.

Re:TWIKI

[Intron]

Not until the computer company starts selling music players and music.

Re:TWIKI

[bill_mcgonigle]

Is it just me or does anyone else remember Buck Rogers from the 70's? The robot character was Twiki... I wonder if that show got a trademark on 'TWIKI' and if so, what would happen to the TWIKI.NET trademark?

I remember that Twiki used to carry around Theo, a sentient computer.

Twiki is an obvious name for a wiki to any Buck Rogers fan, but does anybody know if Theony chose it based on the Theo- root of his name or is that pure coincidence?

Anyway, Theo would be a great name for the new project.

Re:TWIKI

[not-my-real-name]

I still remember Erin Grey in her uniform from the show.

Re:TWIKI

[Anonymous Coward]

Trademark does not necessarily give sole right to a name. Generally a violation would incur if the second use was found to cause Confusion amoung consumers, or Dilute the value of the trademark. Merely causing Distress to consumers by reminding them of a show with Gary Coleman does not constitute trademark infringement.

Still shuddering. I'd rather you'd rickrolled us.

Re:TWIKI

[pbhj]

I wonder if that show got a trademark on 'TWIKI' and if so, what would happen to the TWIKI.NET trademark?

That's not how trademarks work. They're not blanket restrictions against others use of the name (though people with huge amounts of money appear to be able to use them that way). Trademarks indicate the origin of a class of goods. Unless Twiki was registered to indicate the originator of software products then it's fair game - moreover sometimes multiple users can use a RTM in the same class provided their is no confusion. YMMV. Moreover trademarks are territorial.

NextWiki is a perfect follow on name (though the chat logs suggest it's taken) as it's probably not distinctive enough to be registered but includes the characters of Twiki. Perhaps LowFatWiki or PhatWiki or GotWiki or something would work too?

They could house the project in another jurisdiction and still call it TWiki if they want. It's not registered in Europe (just checked, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tm/t-find/t-find-text ) but DentWiki and VetWiki are, so calling it $(String).tWiki is clearly not a problem.

Perhaps Twiki.fk (fork / Falkland Islands)?

IANAIPL

A naming trend?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to suggest uwiki ('u' comes after 't') for the new name and it turns out it was taken. swiki is taken also. I wonder how many of these '?wiki' names are already used?

Re:A naming trend?

[Larryish]

dickwiki?

The VCs obviously think so...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the investors felt any need to get help from the community, they wouldn't have locked the community out.

My experience with VCs has seen them:

• Ignore the product's inventors who had decades of practical experience in implementation
• Uproot a company across country, losing the entire technical staff in the process
• Run the startup at a loss for 5 years, then wash-out the original investors (means the original investors got pennies in return for $100K investments)
• Generally act like idiots who want to be lied to

Their first MO seems to be to rebuild the company from the ground up with "their people." This can avoid lots of personality conflicts based on "new guys vs old guys," I think /. can supply the counterpoint argument here.

Small wonder that their conversion to profit rate is 5%.

WOW. we use Twiki here, looks like I will go with

[MrJerryNormandinSir]

NextTwiki!

Name

[Anonymous Coward]

They should call it witwiki it has a good flow to it!

Why not dispute his ownership of the trademark?

[Random832]

How'd he get sole control over the trademark rights?

Re:Why not dispute his ownership of the trademark?

[zaliv]

Peter Thoeny has always had the trademark to twiki. It has become a problem since he has transferred (parts) of the trademark to TWIKI.NET, the commercial kid on the block. That company wants the control over the trademark and twiki.org development. They could not get the latter naturally, so they forced it their way.

Re:Why not dispute his ownership of the trademark?

[brix]

I'm guessing you mean copyright?

Re:Why not dispute his ownership of the trademark?

[John Hasler]

Most likely by filing the forms, paying the fee, and selling a product. That's the way it is usually done. I doubt anyone has grounds to contest the ownership of the mark but they might be able to contest its validity. They'd have to show that the mark was in widespread use before he registered it and therefor is generic.

Re:Why not dispute his ownership of the trademark?

[rtfa-troll]

Well, the history of SSH says that you can continue to use the trademark for distributing a derivative work of the original software for which the trademark was registered. I guess he may have "sole ownership" without much question, but I doubt he has a right to "sole usage". Of course, maybe the fact that the ssh protocol was a standard makes a difference here?

It might be a nice idea to call the new project OpenTwiki in the same light as OpenSSH. If I were to do this I would ask a lawyer first.

Re:Why not dispute his ownership of the trademark?

[soronthar]

no, he actually means Trademark. As of 2007, TWiki is a registered trademark of Peter Thoeny. Before that, he was the trademark owner basically because he created the project and said so. Everybody who joined the project had that point clear. The problem is that we never imagined that he would actually "sell" the trademark.

Alternatives to TWiki?

[ozbird]

Crap... I was looking at using TWiki at work, but now I have to seriously reconsider now that they don't appear to have a developer community any more.

The key "enterprise" features were the ability (albeit clumsily) to maintain several separate public and private wikis, integration with AD (kinda) for accountability, and the GUI editor was handy for non-Wiki users. Being free/open source also means I didn't have to fill in a mountain of paperwork to try and justify the cost when we're just testing the Wiki water.

Any suggestions for an alternative?

Re:Alternatives to TWiki?

[Ayanami Rei]

Don't freak out. The development community went with the code to greener pastures.

Just wait until NextWiki (or whatever it's going to be called) 4.2.4 is released; it'll have a migration tool that will un-Twiki(TM)ify your existing setup.

My hope is that this is like the XFree86 split. It wound up being much better for the forked project and a lot of nice features and changes came out of new governance. I'm glad this happened, Peter was kind of a jerk.

Re:Alternatives to TWiki?

[zaliv]

Stay tuned at http://twikifork.org/ - until we have a new name. Quoting: "The new project (the name is as of yet undecided, nextwiki, twikifork and notwiki are just placeholders), promises new features that have been long-awaited while maintaining a clear upgrade path for existing installations."

Re:Alternatives to TWiki?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ayanami Rei

Seriously... Kill yourself

A lot of software is in between

[jesterzog]

But how is that different from working on proprietary software? Working on proprietary software earns a paycheck.

This is true to a point but I think it misses a large amount of software that falls in-between.

I don't work on open source software as my day-job, but it's not because my employer is particularly attached to closed source ideals. It's because it's unlikely that anyone except my employer would be interested in the software I'm writing. Nobody's asked for our source code, but if they did (and it wasn't too much hassle to provide) then I think they'd probably get it... and they'd probably be allowed to release it as OSS if they actually wanted to. Similarly, we occasionally ask other organisations for the code they produced to do something, and they're usually happy to give it to us.

As another response to your post pointed out, many large companies do contribute to Open Source Software for one reason or another... either because it enhances their business and experience for their customers, or just because they want to add an improvement for their own reasons, and contributing back to the project is the easiest way to get it done.

How many software development jobs are in the shrink-wrapped closed source market, anyway, as opposed to people who are hired to write specialist software for their employer (or a customer) to use?

Does it really matter

[RomulusNR]

considering that among real Wikis, TWiki is crap?

TWiki's business model revolves around wowing lazy, barely-competent middle managers who will never really use the thing and foisting it on hapless employees while looking tech-savvy to upper management.

AltTwikiDieDieDie.

Personally

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm hoping that TWiki.net dies, and I'm rooting for the fork guys.

This goes to show that you shouldn't have any expectations on how your boss or leader or anyone with power you don't have will always treat you like you think you should.

Once the "leadership" or "the bright future that the project can have" (that is, the extra money the leaders can make for themselves) suddenly turns you from a valuable contributor to some sort of liability, you're dumped.

Most "leaders" don't care about the people. Sometimes the project needs to suffer a bit in order to cater to the opinions and wishes of all members. The point is that most leaders don't care about the individual pawns from whom they transform life force into project pieces. They care first and foremost about the project; That's why they are leaders, that's why they have charisma, and that's why they are rich. The pawns are to be manipulated in order to fulfill his vision.

Even if you give your life away for a project, it is just a matter of "we don't need you anymore" from the ones with power. In this case, the ones with the domain names and the trademarks.

If you are just a grunt, you are expendable. Look at the power you really have: that's all you can count on. All you have learned is what you get; all you have contributed, you can't take it back. So be happy with what you have so far. And when you get dumped, take the lesson and move on.

Oh wonderful

[jimicus]

We run TWiki at work. Not my choice, I hasten to add - it was already in place when I started as sysadmin and had a couple of gigs of data stored there.

I don't really like it.

Even minor upgrades are inevitably a big game of "let's see what's broken next", it's an absolute dog for anyone non-technical to use (there is finally a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't completely break everything in version 4.1) and the core developers tend to be painfully elitist. (as in: We don't care for [FEATURE], you shouldn't have non-techie people using it anyway so if a lack of [FEATURE] puts people off, all the better).

Features which are fairly basic in things like MediaWiki (eg. editing individual sections) require plugins, the plugin API changes drastically from one version to the next.

You can see previous edits but you can't just click a couple of buttons to revert to an earlier version - last time I checked, you had to view the source of the previous version and copy/paste it into a new revision.

Backend data isn't stored in a database; it's RCS. The only realistic way to migrate to any alternative is to write some sort of script but the number of little glitches you're likely to find in a TWiki site that's been running for many years and upgraded a few times is so huge that I hardly dare even try it.

I would dearly love to migrate the lot to a more mature alternative, but now there's so much built around TWiki that it's not really an option.

Re:Oh wonderful

[Tyrathect]

You can see previous edits but you can't just click a couple of buttons to revert to an earlier version - last time I checked, you had to view the source of the previous version and copy/paste it into a new revision.

You can revert to previous versions from the "More" page for a topic.

Reminds me of...

[rapidient]

InstantDB, maybe seven years ago, where any number of contributors got screwed when the sponsoring company, Lutris, took it closed.

You left one, very big, thing out

[SL Baur]

That's a brilliant summary, but you left out one thing - Open Source project leaders also write letters of recommendation on behalf of college n00b^H^H^H^Hformal job history challenged contributors for getting into the workforce.

I did that when I was Mr. XEmacs. I cannot believe I am the only one who does it. My biggest problem with doing letters of recommendation or being a reference was that I wanted to say "This guy is awesome, hire him or else!" but that's neither the most polite or wisest thing to say.

Think of it as karma and the time you spend devoted to supporting Open Source projects will benefit you (and everyone else) manyfold in the future.

Response from TWIKI.NET Interim CEO

[TomBarton]

I wanted to respond to the recent postings regarding TWIKI.NET and the TWiki.org project.

On Monday October 27, we posted a communication regarding a "relaunch" of the TWiki.org community to the TWiki.org website.

Please see: http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/RelaunchTWikiOrgProject

The key points in that communication are:

- exposition of a new governance model (an Ubuntu-style model)
- expansion of the charter of the project to encompass open standards around enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration (not just the wiki)
- greater focus on enterprise scaleability and integration standards

I want to clarify a few things to start off:

- We invite participation in the project. We took the actions that we did in order to increase the long run relevance of the project and increase the number of developers and users. We are not naïve; we certainly recognized that it would create some turmoil in the short run and that many key developers would choose to fork.

- Anyone is free to join this project. In this sense, no one has been "locked out". What we have done is ask that anyone who registers and contributes to the site adhere to a new code of conduct which very clearly specifies the new governance model. And it is important to note that the governance model isn't democratic (more on that later).

- Both TWiki.org and TWIKI.NET are fully compliant with the GPL, and furthermore, the .org is committed to an exclusively open source approach. Under the prior governance model, there were examples of closed source object modules on the site, such as various installers. We didn't think that was right.

I also want to provide a bit of background as to how I see the open source wiki and collaboration space today as a precursor to why we went with the Ubuntu-style model and adopted what is admittedly a pretty radical move.

I would characterize all of the open source projects in this space as being relatively small efforts, and all of them appear to be "thinking small" to me. That is to say they are fairly narrowly focused on some aspect of collaboration (e.g., originally TWiki was focused primarily on the wiki), or for some specific purpose (e.g., MediaWiki's primary purpose is to support Wikipedia). There simply isn't any large effort that is focused on setting open standards and providing an end-to-end open source solution for the full range of enterprise collaboration needs.

Is anyone thinking about how to create a framework and set of APIs to make it easy for arbitrary blog engines or social networking engines to attach into an enterprise collaboration framework? Is anyone thinking about how to standardize data about people, so that it can be shared between different collaboration apps? AD/LDAP approaches are all aimed at authentication and access control, not at capturing richer information about people. Is anyone thinking about how to augment the OpenSocial API to make it more relevant for enterprises and allow people to manage their social graphs between their consumer and enterprise lives, and implement clear privacy rules between the two?

The answer to all of these questions is no. I'm pretty sure the only group of people that are thinking about these problems, while using an open source and open standard approach, are the people at TWIKI.NET, some university researchers and a small number corporations that we have had discussions with.

Our vision of what we want to do for open source enterprise collaboration is pretty broad. It's going to require a lot of resource to get there. Some of that resource will be provided by open source developers, but realistically it will most likely require a lot of commercially focused effort as well. Most of the successful open source efforts out there have some closely aligned commercial entity. When I was at Cygnus Solutions from 1996-2000, roughly 80% of the development in gcc/egcs was directly f

Re:Response from TWIKI.NET Interim CEO

[red1DANIEL]

Hi Tom,
I am no where near this project and thus am giving a very unqualified comment. I think tone is very important to win the hearts and minds of the community. As you know by now, things are very flamable online (strange law of physics).

Even the mention of commercially laced ideas.. i know i know, we need money to even answer a phone call because if no one pays the phone bills, the phone gets cut off.

But there is so much fear among community of a MYSQL style sell off where licensing can be dualised overnight and a sudden feeling of losing one's own home. This has happened at Mambo/Joomla and Compiere/ADempiere.

In the end the community will gravitate and return as a bigger commercial threat.

many regards
red1
Leader of The ADempiere Bazaar
(ADempiere Project is part of it but i quit as the BDFL due to some sudden combustion :) )

Trademarks don't work that way

[JoeBuck]

Trademarks don't give the owner ownership of the word; it's restricted to a particular field of application. Essentially, you can trademark an adjective, not a noun. This company owns "TWiki" as it applies to web and related applications, and the owners of Buck Rogers own "Twiki" as it applies to annoying robots.

Classic Exciting Story

[red1DANIEL]

We at ADempiere FOSS project can relate to many of the comments in this story as we have our very own wars all the time particularly this present fiery one in our forum here.

3 off us due to disagreement and disgust at each other, resigned this week our benevolent positions but still work on the sidelines. I am not sure to cry or to laugh. I trust Eric Raymond's Cathedral and The Bazaar story.

Somehow when you adopt what Linus Torvalds did for Linux, you got a revolution, but you have to survive the egos especially your own. GNU was going ok, but ok is not enough to take on the world giants. Linus finished off the game via his attitude of giving and not caring for kudos back.

red1
ADempiere Bazaar
(evangelist/former benevolent dictator - September 2006 - Today)