TWiki.net Kicks Out All TWiki Contributors 194
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?"
Answer: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Answer: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes.
Stealing other people's work is a very effective strategy to succeed in business without really trying. Look at Microsoft.
What the hell? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Theony will just alienate himself. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Depended, past tense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You make a good point... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Serious issues with this project (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Mambo/Joomla anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You make a good point... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
You'll find no work then (Score:2, Insightful)
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 make a good point... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Theony will just alienate himself. (Score:2, Insightful)
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:You make a good point... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Theony will just alienate himself. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You make a good point... (Score:1, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.