TWiki stops being open source.

In September 2008, there was a TWiki Summit in Berlin, at which a Community Council was elected by Community members to move the TWiki.org project to independence from the TWIKI.NET startup. A few days ago, TWIKI.NET responded, by taking over full control of all of TWiki.org’s servers, locking everyone out and converting the project to Commercial open source.

As I’ve been working on the TWiki codebase for almost 10 years – and started from JOSWiki too, I too feel uncomfortable about this change, Especially as re-signing up to twiki.org requires that I not only agree to a new terms of use, but also to their very evil commercialy based privacy policyPersonal information you provide (or have provided) to TWiki.org may be shared with TWIKI.NET to support ongoing business and communication processes. – essentially saying that they can use your information for marketing themselves, and to sell that information on (you can only opt out of being contacted.)

In the short term, I hope to continue supporting the TWiki installers I build, and with the rest of the active development community, to build an independent alternative.

Please support the twikifork if you’d like to support those that previously developed the codebase called TWiki.

http://blog.musmo.com/2008/10/29/the-end-of-twiki/
http://wordpress.metro.cx/2008/10/28/twiki-is-dead-long-live-twiki/
http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28
http://fosiki.com/blog/2008/10/29/twiki-stops-being-open-source/
http://colas.nahaboo.net/Blog/TWiki_forks
http://michaeldaumconsulting.com/Blog/BlogEntry72
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/29/146201
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=1339353
TWiki's hunt for cash fractures its community (CNET)

What makes an Enterprise Wiki Special

OSDC 2008: Sydney

see me at OSDC 2008 – 3-5 December 2008. I’ll be giving a short talk and demo:

Traditional Wikis are about developing ‘legacy’ documents. Wikipedia is an asymptotic example where the ideal is to craft a perfect topic that accurately and concisely covers its subject matter.

Enterprise Wikis have a different focus :- they attempt to dynamically integrate processes, workflows and data, to support and automate an Enterprises Business Intelligence.

They provide integration points to provide not only an up to date status of an Enterprise, but to provide a Historical record of the development of that status, providing a Knowledge management and decision making framework.

Today, Enterprise Wiki’s are Social Knowledge management systems, recruiting peers throughout an organization, but leading into the future, Enterprise Wiki’s will become Knowledge driven Performance indicating Dashboards.

TWiki 4.2.3 JeOS Virtual Machine

TWiki 4.2 JeOS VM


download mirror 1 460MB (USA) TWiki 4.2.3, (does not include VMware):

Easy installation on Windows, Linux and OSX!

Trivial upgrades of TWiki and TWiki Plugins

Summary: This package enables you to quickly and easily install a pre-configured TWiki 4.2 ‘software appliance’ on Windows, by using the free VMware Player or VMware Server – like another computer running within your computer. This generally performs better than a normal WindowsInstallCookbook approach and is easier to install than IndigoPerlCookbook (takes just 5 minutes, a bit like installing a hard disk that has TWiki and Linux pre-installed). Although running TWiki on Linux on top of Windows may seem complicated, it’s actually much simpler than installing TWikiOnWindowsno TWiki or Linux knowledge is needed to get a working TWiki installation!

IDEA! This uses TWiki VM 4.2.3 released on 12 September 2008. It is installed using SvenDowideit‘s fosiki TWiki debian package repository to make upgrades, and installation of TWiki Plugins (with external dependencies) easy.

TWiki 4.2.3 Windows installer update

TWiki 4.2 for windows – with fully integrated native installers that will update your Computer with perl, apache and other tools needed to run TWiki.

The first of these installers released is the  Windows TWiki installer, and includes

  1. Apache 2.2, (apache_2.2.10-win32-x86-openssl-0.9.8i.msi)
  2. ActiveState Perl (ActivePerl-5.8.8.824-MSWin32-x86-287188.msi)
  3. Gnu Grep
  4. Gnu rcs
  5. Vanilla TWiki 4.2.3.

If the installer detects that you already have the same version (or later) of apache, perl, grep or rcs installed, it will only install the needed components. TWiki is installed into c:\Program Files\TWiki. The main change to the installer is that it now tries to detect non-English ‘Program Files’ directories and install into the right place.

Please download it, try it out and report your impressions, gripes, bugs and successes here on TWiki.org, or in the TWiki Bugs system.

Another TWiki innovation brought to you by fosiki, a  WikiRing.com founding partner.

older releases of Solaris 10

If like me, you’re looking for an older release of Solaris – so you can replicate a client’s setup, you can find them at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/releases.jsp

I couldn’t find it without help – as Sun’s web site is a study in how to make things impossible to find.

Now to install Solaris 10 update 3 (11/06) on my old ultra sparc 5 – yep, 10 year old tech. its been sitting in the garage for the last year or so, but as its built like a tank, it seems to start fine. I do wish the 10K 18.4G Quantum cheetah wasn’t quite such a painful noise though.

My client chooses to use the http://www.sunfreeware.com/ packages – which means that to get Perl 5.8.8 humming (and subversion so I could commit TWiki fixes), required me to install:

  • db-4.2.52.NC-sol10-sparc-local
  • diffutils-2.8.1-sol10-sparc-local
  • expat-2.0.1-sol10-sparc-local
  • gcc-3.4.6-sol10-sparc-local
  • gdbm-1.8.3-sol10-sparc-local
  • grep-2.5.1a-sol10-sparc-local
  • libiconv-1.9.2-sol10-sparc-local
  • libintl-3.4.0-sol10-sparc-local
  • libxml2-2.6.31-sol10-sparc-local
  • make-3.81-sol10-sparc-local
  • ncftp-3.2.1-sol10-sparc-local
  • neon-0.25.5-sol10-sparc-local
  • neon-0.28.3-sol10-sparc-local
  • openssl-0.9.8i-sol10-sparc-local
  • pcre-7.8-sol10-sparc-local
  • perl-5.8.8-sol10-sparc-local
  • rcs-5.7-sol10-sparc-local
  • subversion-1.4.4-sol10-sparc-local
  • swig-1.3.36-sol10-sparc-local
  • wget-1.11.4-sol10-sparc-local
  • zlib-1.2.3-sol10-sparc-local

and after all that, I’m having weird spillover issues with CPAN, caused by having the built in Perl 5.8.4 in the PATH before /usr/local/bin/perl (the 5.8.8)

So if you have more than one Perl installed, and want to use CPAN – BE CAREFUL to set the PATH to use your desired Perl’s path first – calling it directly will lead to problems.