Yesterday I incidently decided to attend the bi-weekly TWiki release meeting. Release meetings with TWiki were more than suggested by just the name: over time they became general meetings where the community discussed the state and future of TWiki. Lucky me, since tonight turned out to be pretty historic: TWiki.net gave the community the finger, and forced a fork.

A short run down for those of you who haven’t been following this blog for that long (i wrote about it twice already):
TWiki is an open-source wiki, a project that was founded about a decade ago by Peter Thoeny. He forked another product, and built on that to create one of the first ‘structured wiki’ platforms. Over the years, Thoeny’s coding contributions declined in favour of a motivated and skilled group of people that carried the TWiki project to maturity.

About a year ago, Thoeny founded the company TWiki.net. Initial skepticism turned out to be justified. TWiki.net decided to forego the community, and force a governance model on the project that met with a lot of resistance from the community. This resulted in a TWiki community summit in Berlin that Thoeny did not attend, and left Tom Barton (TWiki.net ceo) red-eared by taking in the displeased frustration of the community.

So what happened yesterday evening?

At the beginning of the meeting, at which even Tom Barton (who normally showed only a passing interest in the community) showed up, Thoeny introduced a new agenda item: what he dubbed the ‘TWiki.org relaunch‘. I am still mulling over the finer points and implications of this move. An important fact is that the entire community content on the twiki.org site is locked down. Only by signing the ‘terms of use’, one is allowed to contribute again (or remove earlier contributions).

Needless to say, i did not sign those yet. And I don’t think I will.

Although the events are sad in one way, it is refreshing to finally see twiki.net take a definitive stand against the community, making explicit what has been implicit in their behaviour. The project can now be taken out of limbo. Most (if not all) of the active contributors have jumped ship and gotten on the fork bandwagon. There’s a great number of features lined up that people didn’t commit during the governance crisis, for fear of being taken advantage over by TWiki.net. They have proven again and again that marketing the hard work of community volunteers as their own is not below them.

Obviously, TWiki.net’s recent action forced the active community to continue the project under another name (as the TWiki trademark is owned by Thoeny and licensed to TWiki.net). With the active contributors locked out of the TWiki project home site, it is being used as a propaganda platform. Thoeny has already threatened the community to sue when the fork mentions the T-word in its name or otherwise. It’s sad to see the last throws of a dying power-hungry dictator. It is sad to see TWiki die. It is sad to see hardware donated to the community by SUN and others being reappropriated by TWiki.net for their own marketing strategies.

But there is hope. The project is free of its shackles again! There will be a lot of work getting the new project infra-structure in shape, and it is truly a pity that Thoeny forces the community to this duplication of effort. On the other hand, there is much room for improvement, improvement that now can be made. The same goes for the project itself, which will not be known as TWiki anymore. The next few days will give us the projects new name, and a first release is expected in the very near future.

TWiki is dead, long live TWiki!

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