Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

I sent a letter expressing extreme displeasure to the contact
addresses listed in their newly corporate twiki.net, and found
a probably predictable weasel-worded response sent in return -- and
copied to 24 of my colleagues at about a dozen institutions. I
attach it below:

------------
From: Will Thomas <Will.Thomas@twiki.net>
To: don@isc.astro.cornell.edu
cc: [long list deleted]
Subject: Re: Shameful, repulsive behavior by Peter Thoeny and company
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:57:47 -0700 (17:57 EDT)

Hello Don,

Since you felt so inclined to cc: everyone at TWIKI.NET, I thought I should do the same to your organization.

If you haven't already, please see Tom Barton's comments on the change. http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/RelaunchTWikiOrgProje...

We should start by responding to your opening salutation to TWIKI.NET as the "appropriators of the TWiki brand"; actually Peter has owned the brand since he created the project almost (10) years ago. There was group of individuals in the development community wanting to take the brand from him and the commercial rights he assigned to the company he founded and is CTO.

We appreciate your concerns about the change. The decision to make them was not taken lightly. I find your concerns somewhat interesting, in that you have no way of knowing Peter's personal contributions to the project over the past ten years. You're not alone; most of his contributions go completely unrecognized by the vast majority TWiki users. I've known Peter for sometime before coming to work with him, and have a reasonable understanding of his contributions. When I was an end user of the open source back in 2002, Peter personally helped me with technical issues w/o expecting anything in return. Generally speaking, contributions to an open source project can be and are biased by the amount of code contributed by a particular developer, but there is a lot more than coding to keep a project moving forward.

It seems fairly clear that as an individual (a self defined "happy user") and organization who makes good use TWiki software in your projects, you have derived substantial benefit of everything the community (Peter included) has done and not taken the time to contribute anything back except by way of a distracting complaint to TWIKI.NET. Obviously using the GLP code is your right, but your lack of community involvement detracts somewhat from the weight of your strongly worded criticism. I might argue that some of the challenges related to the project and the community were directly related to participation. What we hope is that the recent changes will open the project to greater participation. Of course, you clearly disagree with the approach.

It's sort of expected that many corporate users receive substantial benefit from open source software without giving anything back. What is difficult for me to understand why an extremely intelligent group of individuals associated with a leading academic institution and program, and who obviously could have easily contributed something this back to the community before this, choose not to. This is a general problem for open source projects everywhere. It appears that well ahead of the recent changes at the .org site you have done all you can to obfuscate the fact that the IRS sites are powered by TWiki software, so there is really no benefit to TWiki as a project, or TWIKI.NET as a company regardless of anything that happens at IRS' wiki sites. At same time you promise to "insert community advice" (in somewhat of a threating tone) about a project that as far I or anyone can tell you were never a member of. Again, that is clearly something you have the right to do, but if you had contributed something to the project, your comments and strongly worded criticism would have significantly greater weight. If you have contributed or participated in the community in some way that are not obvious, my thanks and apologies in advance.

Please also see the http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiCodeOfConduct and if so inclined, please comment on anything you find disagreeable.

Whatever open source projects you choose to use in pursuit of you personal and professional goals, please do something to support them.

Regards,

Will

---------------
My response:

A brand exists as both a social construct and a legal construct. Ideally
the legal version mirrors the social one. In free software development,
we have a dearth of history and revisions to make this so. This is one
case where the social construct of TWiki (inherited by a now exiled
developers community) has diverged from the legal construct (a trademark
assigned to one Peter Thoeny and presumably subassigned by him
to a new corporate construct). I've followed -- and used -- and made
some patch suggestions to plugins for eight years, so I've seen where the bulk
of work has been recently. I have not seen this COO's name in that
space.

Appropriating the brand has made Peter's version a "Fork of one" --
in reality, the community itself didn't leave (though they certainly
were pushed!) -- rather the brandholder left with his name. The
community is really the same, unimpeded in fact by the strife over
the last three years now -- and other than the (considerable) work
of putting the tools back online stripped of the encumbered brand
and finding equivalent horsepower to replace that donated, presumably
also under a different set of assumptions.

The community should and no doubt will make the socially responsible choice and reward
the actually contributing community by using
their product -- and when they have a name, their brand. I'm sure it'll
be protected so that the stunt pulled a few days ago won't happen again.