Right before my short holiday in Germany (great country, they know their trains very well), i decided to hop by on friday afternoon at the Berlin TWiki community summit, which had been going on for a day already at that point. The stakes were set high: as a result of TWiki.net’s hi-jacking of the open source project a fork was in the air. An ultimatum was set: succumb to our demands or we fork. Needless to say, a fork would reflect bad on TWiki.net and would make their investors frown.

The day before, i was on the phone following the proceedings in Berlin via tele-conference facilities. I wish I had been there: TWiki.net CEO Tom Barton was reported to be utterly surprised by the unequivocal hostility in the community towards TWiki.net. It must have been quite an embarrassing affair for the CEO: should he not have known his technical lead and community liason had squandered their trusth-worthiness with the community? Perhaps he did, and the embarrassement was mere acting in order to continue singing the old song: ‘give us some time we will work things out’. It does indicate that TWiki.net is clearly not an active part of the TWiki community.
Anyway, the summit brought a lot of unexpected and very positive results! Founder Peter Thoeny has dropped his demand to be the ‘benevolent dictator for life’, and there is even an opening for a TWiki foundation. The committee that Peter appointed to iron out the governance issues has been replaced by a more democratically chosen team, with surprising new blood Adam Hyde (whom I already met a couple of times in Amsterdam).
But some issues are still in the air: founder Thoeny is regarded the ‘chief TWiki evangelist’ and is thus allowed to continue to bring a mixed message. While evangelizing the open source project, he will at the same time advertise his own company. The distinction will remain unclear in that regard, i fear. More importantly, there is the trademark-issue. Thoeny owns the TWiki trademark, and now demands that any mention of the TWiki project in online media is accompanied by a link to TWiki.net. This is unfair competition, and to me totally unacceptable.

So some key facts remain hanging in the air. Despite the intented ultimatum (‘resolve things at the summit or we fork’), TWiki.net and Peter Thoeny have been granted yet another period of delay. Discussion around some key issues continues, without any involvement from Thoeny himself, just as it has been in the past years. His passive attitude paralyzes the community once more.
At the end, Martin Seibert asked me “will you be back on board?”. I could not give a positive answer to that question, not just yet. I answered that I will start to get involved again, read up on the latest discussions, maybe pinch in a comment here or there. But as the mixup between the TWiki open source project and the commercial entity TWiki.net is still not resolved to my satisfaction, i don’t see an opening to start contributing actively yet. I look forward to seeing results that fullfill the promises made at the summit.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 21:03 and is filed under English, Science 'n stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.