BOSTON, Mass — November 30, 2009 — GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands from the 24th through the 30th of July 2010. The conference is expected to draw more than 500 attendees to discuss and direct the future of the GNOME Project. GUADEC will draw members of the GNOME development and user community, as well as many participants in the overall FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and companies.

The conference will lead up to the GNOME 3.0 release in September 2010. Keeping with the 3.0 theme, the three primary themes for GUADEC 2010 will be Government, education, and end users.

The Hague was one of several locations proposed for GUADEC in 2010. It was chosen in part due to the excellent facilities at the bid site, as well as easily accessible site for those traveling to GUADEC. The conference will be held at the Haagse Hogeschool, the higher vocational education institute in the region with an existing affinity for open source.

“Free Software is of great importance to culture in the digital age,” said Kees Vendrik, Green MP and advocate of open source and open standards in the Dutch public sector. “It offers a fertile feeding ground for education, innovation, and the economy at large. My party is delighted that the GNOME conference is coming to The Netherlands and we believe it will inspire our governmental bodies to put policy into practice.”

The core team of the winning bid consists of Vincent van Adrighem, Koen Martens, Sanne te Meerman, Fabrice Mous, and Reinout van Schouwen. Each of the core team members are well-rooted in the FLOSS community at large, with network spanning the most active FLOSS organizations in The Netherlands.

“We are very excited and honored to host GUADEC next year,” said Reinout van Schouwen. “With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.0, we’re confident that the conference will be one of the most important ones in the history of the GNOME project. We would like to invite the Free Software communities in our country and abroad to take advantage of this opportunity and show the world that open technology offers solutions for everyone!”

GUADEC is now in its 11th year, and follows a successful joint conference, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS), in 2009 with the KDE Project. As planned, GUADEC 2010 will be hosted on its own, but the door is open to another co-hosted event in the future.

Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said that GCDS was “a great conference, and an opportunity to work with our friends in the KDE Project on areas where both desktops can benefit. We hope to build on that experience this year with GUADEC.”

See the GUADEC Website for more information about the conference. Registration details and information on the call for papers will be up by January 6th. Look for another announcement at that time with more details about the CFP and tracks for GUADEC 2010.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org.
Media Enquiries

GNOME Foundation Executive Director
Stormy Peters
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Phone: +1-617-206-3947

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)