WARNING: This legacy page is obsolete, kept for historical purposes only.

TWiki forks

Well, it has finally happened, the dual-faced Janus what makes both the beauty of Open Source projects, and its Dark side, have come to visit the twiki Project. The Fork is here! Strangely this time, it is the project founder, Peter Thoeny who "forked out" most of the active developers of the Open Source project by locking them out of the project. Ironically he seemed to have so much dreared a fork that he finally decided to provoke a "preeemptive fork" to clear things out, and reach an often seen configuration where a private company sells a product based on an Open Source offering, with a community knowingly contributing to enhance a product belonging to a single company, but getting a better product in return. This is not a bad situation in itself, for wikis it is already the case with xwiki and deki, the problems came in TWiki case as the company came very late in the picture, and could be seen as "highjacking" the TWiki built by the community.

We will see what happens, but I would like you to read the excellent article made nearly a decade ago, WHY LINUX WON'T FORK - And why being able to fork is still A Good Thing. If all goes well, it will end up in more technical directions explored, each project incorporating the good ideas of the other one. If not, the crisis will show the bad side of many people, and will discourage contributors watching from the outside 2 communities dying from the lack of a critical mass.

As I was asked to take sides, I chose the "fork" camp, as I feel that it is where lies the heart of the community that actually made the modern TWiki. We will see how it evolves, but the beauty of open source is that both projects will be able to use the advances of the other one - if one do not end a proprietary fork. May we live in interesting times!

For more info, see:

On the TWiki.net Company side
- the announce
- the site
- The twiki irc logs at the time of the fork,
- the meeting log of the release meeting the fork was decided
On the Community side
- the new site (Nextwiki is a temporary name)
- The twiki_fork irc logs at the time of the fork
- testimonials

In the news:

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki on slashdot
TWiki.net Kicks Out All TWiki Contributors on slashdot
TWiki's hunt for cash fractures its community on CNet
Quarrel over TWiki - Friendly Takeover by Founder? on Linux Magazine
reddit entry
digg entry

On the blogs of:

Update: The definitive name is FOSWIKI

As of 18 Nov 2008, the community we decided on the new name: Foswiki - Free and Open Source Wiki. This was chosen after a vote process to chose a name with com/net/org domain names available, and not infringing on a trademark in both US and Europe (this is why we couldn't keep the temporary name nextwiki, as it was a registered trademark of NextEngine, Inc).