LWN: Comments on "Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki"

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

donbarry — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:27:03 +0000

Log of the IRC "Release Meeting"

http://nextwiki.org/pub/Community/TWikiReleaseMeeting2008...

Timeline of TWiki: http://nextwiki.org/Home/WhyThisFork

Archive of TWiki related IRC chats in general:
http://colas.nahaboo.net/twikiirc/bin/irclogger_logs
(shows how the locus of development has changed)

As for the email: I sent my complaint to the three designated contact addresses given on twiki.net -- a small company that hides behind general
emails ("sales", "investors", etc) but where all will be read by one of
two or three people. The reply was sent to 24 email addresses buried many links down one of my many <not>wiki sites, including collaborators and colleagues at ten institutions. They are amused. I am not.

You find parity in this? That is a most peculiar appraisal.

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

epa — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:05:33 +0000

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.

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

donbarry — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:43:58 +0000

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

You are (intentionally?) only mentioning the code of conduct issue. 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.

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. Professional? I'll let others be the judge. Would you care to do
business with such an organization?

The community has voted with its feet. Compare the development logs between the #twiki and #twiki_fork channels since then (http://colas.nahaboo.net/twikiirc/bin/irclogger_logs). Look at the Wikipedia page, and who tried to first purge all mention of the walkout, and then when that proved impossible, weasel it into an inconspicuous place. Look at the changelogs on twiki.org and the pace of new "development". Perhaps you'd care to solidarize yourself with the the new "Benevolent" Dictator. That is of course your right. You may, however, find it somewhat lonely over there.

And yes, I do boycott Novell. I do so proudly.

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

epa — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:30:17 +0000

I don't think that is 'weasel words' at all, and I think it is a mistake to assume that someone must be 'corrupted' by venture capital simply because they have a different opinion to yours. (That line of thinking ends up at Boycott Novell.)

Did you read the message from Tom Barton he linked to? <http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/RelaunchTWikiOrgProje...>

Being asked to sign up to an Ubuntu-based code of conduct doesn't seem like being forced to kneel before Zod. From the initial coverage of this split I got indignant like everyone else, and got ready to migrate away from TWiki to Nextwiki or whatever the fork will be called; but there are two sides to every story, and it's beginning to look as though the original developer (Peter Thoeny) might be acting reasonably and it's the 'community' who are throwing a tantrum.

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

sitaram — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:58:15 +0000

Bravo!

He also forgets that a project does not exist unless it has users. Saying "if you didn't contribute, you have no right to complain" puts him in such a bad light I can't believe he said it, but that is what he appears to be saying, loud and clear.

We all contribute somewhere, somehow, on some project, even if it is just evangelism, helping someone somewhere, whatever... I used to use TWiki a long time ago (2000/2001) and advocated it quite heavily in my then-workplace.

The more I read about this sordid story the more disgusted I feel; rarely has any recent story upset me so much. Maybe it's because of the feeling of some sort of trust having been broken.

At my current workplace I know of at least one internal Wiki that uses TWiki; I'll be sure to let them know to switch as soon as the main version (not the one-person-fork called twiki.net) has a proper name and address.

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

sitaram — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:41:19 +0000

The Linux brand, which is owned by Linus Torvalds, is a perfectly visible example of how you can protect your brand name *without* this sort of foolishness.

I'm curious if anyone knows (or can find) what other "commercial open source" projects are being funded by the same VC/law firm/set of investors.

Worse, I suspect the tough times will shake out more of this sort of utterly misguided and self-destructive behaviour. Especially if the project in question is not being run transparently to start with, which certainly appeared to be the case here.

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

donbarry — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:39:28 +0000

Apparently Thoeny isn't the only one with dancing sugarplums of
VC capital corrupting their vision in the group -- they must
be smarting.

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.

Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki

donbarry — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 03:17:30 +0000

With apologies to Bertolt Brecht:

"on the Dilemma of Unpopular Leadership"

After the uprising of Oct 28,
The self-appointed Dictator of the TWiki Project
Had signs emplaced in the domains
Upon which was to be read that the developers
had forfeited the confidence of the leadership
and could only reclaim it
through redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
Still for the leadership
to dissolve the developers
and elect another?

For *shame* Peter Thoeny. For shame! For shame!