TWiki Forks and Related Software Projects

Over the years there have been several open source projects inspired by TWiki.

TWiki roots

• TWiki, 1998-07, was a continuation of JosWiki, a simple wiki created by Markus Peter and Dave Harris

Projects forked from TWiki

• Spinner Wiki, 2001 (abandoned)

• O'Wiki fork, 2003 (abandoned)

• Foswiki fork, 2008
  Background: Forked in October 2008 after TWiki adopted a community governance model based on the commercial open source Ubuntu project, with the goal to scale the TWiki community and project. Several successful open source projects adopted a commercial open source model, including MySQL, Zimbra and Red Hat. Meanwhile, a collection of consultants called the WikiRing had developed a consulting practice based on the open source TWiki project and were in favor of a different governance model. There were several discussions in the community to reconcile the governance model and leadership of the community. The WikiRing consultants eventually decided not to opt into the new governance model and left the project to form a fork called NextWiki. While several attempts have been made to reach out to the new community to have a friendly relationship, unprofessional and discourteous behavior including defacing the TWiki.org sandbox, aggressive and misleading information on twitter and IRC channels, virulent blog posts and disingenuous SPAM emails (using the twiki.org user database from an old backup) to try and capitalize on the success of the TWiki project have made this task difficult. The TWiki.org community wishes them well in the difficult task of creating and nurturing a professional open source community, and continues to welcome developers that wish to contribute to both communities, subject to their respective codes of conduct.
  • Update 2012-06: Both projects continue with different focus. The TWiki community is focusing primarily on better usability and features needed in the workplace, with contributions mainly by companies using TWiki; whereas the fork continues to be run by geeks for geeks.
    
  • Update 2013-09: Many key contributors seem to have left the Foswiki project. Contributions are tapering off considerably. According to Foswiki stats on Ohloh, in the previous 12 month they had -73% commits, and -28% contributors. For comparison, TWiki has +220% commits and +60% contributors in the same period.
    

Projects inspired by TWiki

• JotSpot, 2004, for "company providing an application wiki" (acquired by Google and de-featured as Google Sites in 2008)

• XWiki, 2004, for structured wiki concept

• RangersKB, 2009, presented by RangersTech

Related:

• TWikiConsultants - TWiki consultants that can help you deploy & upgrade TWiki

-- Contributors: MilindPansare, PeterThoeny - 2013-09-17