I can’t help but feel the need to follow-up on Thoeny’s blog post on TWiki.org (archived here just in case they delete it again, which seems to be the effect of me linkting to anything on twiki.org lately).The blog post contains some inaccurate and false statements on the subject of the commercial take-over of a once-thriving open source community.

The short answer

   Contributors on ohloh.net (TWiki in red, Foswiki in green)

While strictly speaking, TWiki.org (distinguising it from its commercial guardian TWiki.net by the tacking on of .org) is still open source, it is far from open. A year ago, the entire existing community was locked out (by denying access to the twiki.org wiki, the collaboration platform for the project). They would only be let in again, after agreeing to a new ‘code of conduct’. The code of conduct reinforced Thoeny’s self-appointed role as dictator of the project, contrary to the mainstream tendency in the community to bring more democracy to the project. By now, the community exists of Thoeny and TWiki.net employees. A year ago, TWiki.net released some preliminary and alpha-level code to the community and then stopped contributing. TWiki.org has degraded into an outlet for TWiki.net marketing.

The details:

11 years ago, Thoeny initiated the TWiki project by forking off the Joswiki codebase. He has always considered it to be his project, which is only logical. But when the project grew over time, the community did as well. Until at some point, Thoeny’s contributions to the project were only in advocacy. He had successfully built a community around the project, full of enthousiasm to make the project an even bigger success. Over the years, the platform was rearchitected to the point that Thoeny lost touch with the codebase, diminishing his development contributions to zero.

Then Thoeny dropped the ball. True leaders know when it is time to take a step back, Thoeny didn’t know and persisted in his ownership of the project. He could not tolerate other opinions on the direction of the project. He framed these different opinions as ‘the dissonant voice of a small group of consultants who do not buy in to the TWiki.net strategy’. Said strategy, at the time, meant that all and any TWiki related business would be funelled through TWiki.net. A rather strict enforcement of Thoeny’s trademark on the name TWiki aimed to kill any competition in the market.

TWiki started out as Thoeny’s baby, grew up to become a teen that struggled from independency of its parents. Thoeny was afraid to let his child go, and held on to it as an overly-protective parent. In the end, the venture-capital fueled paranoia and untrusting nature of the parent led to a break between the community and the dictator. Thoeny kept the name, the community kept the enthousiasm, know-how and drive under the new name Foswiki. Out of the almost 40.000 subscribed TWiki accounts, only about 6.500 agreed to the code of conduct. Most probably didn’t know what they were agreeing on, considering it just one more ‘I agree to the terms and conditions’ checkbox one checks without thinking.

Meanwhile, TWiki.org has detoriated. The download page (archived here) is one huge advertisement for TWiki.net. The recent addition of a form collecting sales leads for TWiki.net completes the picture. How commercial does it have to be before one cannot escape the conclusion that yes, TWiki.org did go commercial?

In case you are not convinced, consider the community support area. The handling of support requests is almost exclusively done by one person: Thoeny again. What happens if Thoeny is unavailable, for some reason not able to work on TWiki.org anymore (as has happened frequently in the past). Can one person handle all these support requests? The current situation seems hardly sustainable. What if Thoeny breaks down and can’t handle the flow? You are left to paid support with TWiki.net, as witnessed by this recent support request or recent support answers on the TWiki irc channel.

This all paints a bleak picture: a one-man community is not a viable and sustenaible solution for the enterprise. The TWiki.org website is nothing more than a marketing front for the venture capital firm TWiki.net, which itself is mostly a marketing company. The latest contribution to the community is a video full of buzz-words but without much content.

So the answer to the original question, “Did TWiki.org go commercial?” should be a resounding “YES” to anyone who digs into the facts. It is a sorry state of affairs, but unfortunately one I foresaw when things started to rumble.

(ps, I am obliged to note that TWiki® is a registered trademark of TWiki founder Peter Thoeny, TWIKI.NET. The TWiki logo and the “Collaborate with TWiki” tagline are trademarks of Peter Thoeny)

Tonight, instead of being at the Dutch Pinball Open as I should have been (curseth be thee, o weak flu-ridden body), I whipped up a little script to retweet everything on twitter that has the hashtag #revspace on the revspace twitter feed. Just for your enjoyment, here is the script. It probably has some caveats (eg. looping forever when authentication fails), and almost no error handling at all, but it suffices for now.

#
#    retweet.py - retweet based on hashtag
#    Copyright (C) 2009  Koen Martens
#
#    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
#    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
#    (at your option) any later version.
#
#    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#    GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#    along with this program.  If not, see .
#

import json
import urllib
import os
import sys

hashtag  = '#revspace'
user     = 'revspacenl'
password = 'foobarbaz'

class MyUrlOpener(urllib.FancyURLopener):
    def set_user(self,user):
        self.user=user

    def set_password(self,password):
        self.password=password

    def prompt_user_passwd(self,host,realm):
        print 'auth host '+host+' realm '+realm
        return (self.user, self.password)

def get_searchurl(hashtag):
    if (os.path.exists('refresh.'+hashtag)):
      file = open('refresh.'+hashtag)
      refresh_url = file.readline()
      file.close()
      return refresh_url
    return 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=' + urllib.quote(hashtag)

def search(searchurl):
    sock = urllib.urlopen( searchurl )
    response = json.load( sock )
    sock.close()

    return response

def save_refreshurl(hashtag,refresh_url):
    file = open('refresh.'+hashtag,'w');
    file.write(refresh_url+'\n');
    file.close()

def update_status(user,password,tweet):
    data = urllib.urlencode( { 'status': tweet } )

    try:
      opener = MyUrlOpener()
      opener.set_user(user)
      opener.set_password(password)
      sock = opener.open( 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json',data )
      response = json.load( sock )
      sock.close
    except:
      sys.stderr.write( "Unexpected error:" + sys.exc_info()[0] )

searchurl = get_searchurl(hashtag)

print 'Search url: '+searchurl

response = search(searchurl)

for result in response['results']:
  if result['from_user'] != user:
    tweet = 'RT @'+result['from_user']+': '+result['text']
    print tweet
    update_status(user,password,tweet)

save_refreshurl(hashtag,'http://search.twitter.com/search.json'+response['refresh_url'])

(appeared first on hackerspace.nl)

“Why isn’t there a hackerspace in Den Haag?”. A question frequently overheard during Hacking at Random (HAR2009), the recent hacker camp in The Netherlands. And a good question as well.

Well, the answer now is: because you did not join Revelation Space yet!

There are quite a lot of hackers (which, for purposes of this article I characterize as intelligent people with a critical point of view on
the status quo) in The Netherlands. This fact is evident in the masses of Dutch people that visit hacker conferences, the fact that for a
country as small as ours there is a large number of IT security firms and the realized potential of the four-yearly Dutch hacker camps (HAR2009 being the latest of these).

Now, I do not know much about the history of the CCC, but I do know this club provides structure to the German hacker community. Something that has been lacking in the Dutch hacker community, rooted in the anarchistic Amsterdam eighties. Without something like the CCC, that for all its flaws gives the scene identity and a sense of belonging, the Dutch hackers are a loosely bound community. Hackerspaces might be able to add this structure to the Dutch hacker community, as has happened in Germany and the US already.

Anyway, back to Den Haag, international city of peace and justice. And, on a larger scope, the city-county Haaglanden: Zoetermeer (IT city pur-sang), Delft (home of one of our most well known technical universities), Voorburg, Rijswijk and more. It is only fitting that this region gets a hackerspace, where we can meet, collaborate and come up with great projects.

Not only does such a hackerspace have an inward function, it should also be a center of outreach. A source of education for the masses on how technology touches our lives, and how everyone should be critical.

To make this possible, we need you! Under the name ‘Revelation Space’, a group of hackers from the region are trying to make it happen. Set up the underlying structure, rent a space, decorate it, come up with nice projects and whatever else is involved.

I appeal not only to the hard-core kernel hackers that are out there, geeks who stay up late at night to wrestle through encryption protocols for fun and profit, but also to the artistic among us that play with technology or the social hackers that dive deep into the human mind and find tricks to exploit its design. In other words: hackers of all persuasions are invited to join!

If you are interested, make sure to head over to the RevSpace wiki, join the mailing list or join us on IRC. I hope to be able to say ‘hi’ to many of you in the near future!

Koen Martens (gmc)
gmc@har2009.org
http://wordpress.metro.cx/

Well, what can I say: HAR2009 if going to be f*cking awesome! I planned some early downtime today, but failed hard. Started early, opening up the cashier. I’ve now got a team of dependable and excellent guys&gals to run the back office, the cashier desk and the coin shop.

Then had to coordinate some stuff, among which the harcade. It’s funny in a way, how a 100m walk suddenly takes half an hour, what with all the people asking for your opinion, decision or other input. It’s great though how all the people on the terrain are jumping at every opportunity to help out. That’s what i’ve been doing it for the past year!

Forgot to eat as well. Luckily there was some food left at Sabine’s, which I heated in the microwave and ate during the team-lead meeting at 22:00. After that I went around the terrain to hand out volunteer hats.

At the HARfm area, i found a lot of stressed out people. Turns out I arrived 15 minutes before they went live, so i sat down in the studio and joined in for the first chaotic hour of broadcasting. Looking forward to doing my shows on HARfm later on!

After that, I went to the HARcade, to find my ultimate wet dream. While I was busy doing boring money business, random people turned the large empty space into a gameroom that exceeds my wildest dreams! Great job people, I love you!

I’m so proud to be a part of this edition of the event, and so glad it is turning out to be such a brilliant kick-ass edition. Hope I can keep my eyes dry this wednesday, when i’m delivering the opening speech :)

Wow, things are really really busy now. We didn’t expect the numbers arriving early to be this big. To think we were afraid that not enough people would show up early. Thinks are shaping up, today we had the first actual run at the cashier. People arriving, tickets scanned (I even had my ticket scanned, finally).

The unexpected masses arriving has led to some improvisation: we basically weren’t ready for this much people. But everyone has worked very hard to get things up to shape. Amazing, really, to see how fast a random group of people can switch into high gear and get everything ready. Of course, sleep is among the first things to be sacrificed. When asking ‘how are things’, a frequent answer is ‘good, perfect, just a bit tired’.

So much happened today and yesterday, that I won’t even try to enumerate. Some personal highlights: the blinkenlights arrived in the HARcade! Next to ST:TNG and Adams Family, we now have Tommy. Tomorrow, a shitload of pinball games will be unloaded. The asteroids is there already, as is the voice-controlled racetrack and i’ve seen the floating ducks being set up. Can’t wait till the metacade is being put up! Some guys even arranged for DDR mats. We had some rain today, but Cinder promised that will clear up at 6AM. There are still tents being built. The HARfm tent is ready though, and the antenna is up already. A/V arrived in a big truck and two smaller ones, and is

The sudden influx sparked an email to our visitors, which prompted some varied responses. Apart from one or two whiners, who forgot that we’re not professional event organisers and are making it up as we go, the response to that email has been very understanding. Of course, people who come from far can’t just change their travel plans (think airplanes), but I think without the email we would have at least a 500 people here already.

I don’t know what to expect tomorrow. Will we have a 1000 visitors by the end of the day?? There is still a shitload to do, so i’ll be running to and from again I guess. I’ll try to keep you updated through the har2009 twitter feed though, as i’ve been doing in the past days!