Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

Posted Nov 7, 2008 14:05 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki by donbarry
Parent article: Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

Yes, I did. Did you read the logs from the lockout of the developers one minute before the weekly scheduled development meeting?

Not yet - I did read some IRC logs of Peter Thoeny offering to discuss with them and being kicked off the channel, which made the dissatisfied developers look like weenies to me. If you have a link to the original IRC log I'll gladly have a look.

The larger issue is that the name of the platform is controlled by one individual who has rattled sabers about its use to others who share in its development in order to privilege his commercial site above others. If that individual was the primary developer, perhaps that would be fair. He is not. He was merely the first developer.

He's the one who originally picked the name TWiki for his project, surely? Ultimately if there are to be two different projects they need to have two different names. I suppose the truly fair solution would be for both of them to rename themselves, neither keeping the name TWiki so that neither could be accused of stealing goodwill attached to that name.

And consider the behavior of a member of that new privileged commercial organization in replying to a critical email: harvesting addresses from one of my professional wikis and spamming them in toto with a reply.

Didn't he give a reason for that:

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

This is probably a bit silly - even if someone did spam every address at my domain I would reply back to that one person - but I don't think it is something to make a big thing about, especially if you did the same thing yourself.

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