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 policy – Personal 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)
4 thoughts on “TWiki stops being open source.”