TWiki and the Fork

On the 27 October the TWiki community was split and a fork was started with the temporary name of NextWiki. Although I don’t know all the politics behind this, it seems there has been friction between the community and TWIKI.NET for a long time. There are many other blogs and news pages that summarises the fork and some are linked at the bottom of this post.

In my opinion I sympathise with the fork. It does seem that TWiki has become commercialised and TWIKI.NET want to use the project to create a product it can make money from. The ads all over twiki.org seem to confirm this. The statement from Tom Barton clearly defined what they want TWiki to be in the future, which many in the community did not agree on. This meant they needed to get rid of the community that wanted to go a different path in order to have it their own way.

So for now I have agreed to the Terms of Use at twiki.org so I can continue to maintain and support the plugins I have there. I also plan to move my plugins to the fork as soon as possible. I then hope to keep my plugins compatible with both for as long as practical. By then, it should be clear which project I want to support and this will get my full attention.

Update 18/11/08: The community decided name for the fork is Foswiki - Free and Open Source Wiki.

Links