Did TWiki.org go commercial?
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)
