15 Mar
2010
15 Mar
'10
6:10 p.m.
Hi Denis,
On Dec 17, 2009, at 11:37 AM, Denis Gervalle wrote:
Hi Vincent,
We had already talk in the past about that matters. Globally, what you
proposed seems good and really honest.
But until we see a real implementation, it is difficult to know if it could
have or not a negative effect on the way the product is seen by open-source
adepts.
I completely agree with Pascal, and I also feel that if what you propose is
well done, it could be a win-win-win operation, for XWiki SAS, other
contributing companies like we are, and the end-user of our products.
My main concerns about your proposal is the same as Fabio, it is about the
ranking of contributors to receive what you have called the good spot. I
feel that the policy could be really difficult to write, since there are
many ways to contributes. Moreover, wasting time in ranking discussion does
not go in the direction of improving the open-source project. We could go
into endless discussion on that point, and I wonder if this point is not
only the result of XWiki SAS marketing departing pushing toward to receive
the good spot ! So, even if Softec/eGuilde could expect also to receive a
good spot, I think that it could be simpler to treat every advertising at
the same level, with a uniform presentation, and showing true facts only
like the number of bugs reports, patch contributions, realizations, and so
on. Having a list freely sortable on such true facts, could produce a
somewhat variable ranking that does not suffer discussion, since providing
bugs reports, patch or using the product intensively all contribute to XWiki
success and are measurable values. Combining them to get a single ranking is
really a more difficult to agree upon.
Several points here:
* Indeed XWiki SAS would be interested in getting the big sport and rightfully so IMO ;)
* This is not about contribution in the general open source terms. For example we have a
page listing what people could contribute to (doc, patches, ideas, etc). This is about
being one of the **makers** of XWiki, i.e a large and substantial contribution. If
you've submitted 10 patches, I don't feel you should be entitled to be considered
one of the makers of XWiki. Actually, right now I see only one way of ensuring a company
(or individual for that matter) is a "maker" of XWiki: it's by being an
active committer. Being voted a committer requires that you show a long term dedication
for the XWiki project.
* The number of _active_ committers could be a very good metric for the ranking IMO. We
need to define active but I'd say more than 1 commit every month for example (we can
fine tune this ;)).
Another way to increase the visibility of contributor
could be links from
there contributions on XWiki.org, like links from a macro, plug-ins,
documentation,... ; but we should than be careful to not clutter the
interface. However, this could be implemented has an extension of the way
XWiki shows the all authors of a given page, showing avatars, and linking to
their listings for example, and this could improve visibility of XWiki SAS
as this seems to be one of your goal, without being dishonest.
Showing contributors is a different matter. We're not talking about advertising
services from the "makers of XWiki".
For contributors reward we should IMO do the following:
* improve the Hall of Fame page, keep it more up to date (everyone should help)
* Have a better dashboard on the home page about individual contributions
* Have an inbuilt forum with points awarded when people answer to other's questions on
the forum/mailing list
* rework the code.xwiki.org pages to highlight contributions
Regarding point 6), I am not sure this is so
pertinent, since there is many
other place where the project could have been hosted, like open-source
repositories (or on my own infrastructure, wdyt to see my logo on all pages
;) ),
If we were hosted there, then we would definitely thank them for hosting us! BTW our
downloads are hosted on ow2 for example and they are listed as sponsors indeed.
If the pb is the location, we could keep the thanks in the sponsors page as it's
currently done:
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Supporters
Therefore I am not sure that XWiki SAS should be shown
on the bottom
of every page for that. Once against this smell like marketing pushing you
and I feel the visibility of XWiki SAS would therefore be too present IMHO.
I definitely don't agree and I find your answer not very honest. I think you have no
idea how much it costs to host farms like xwiki.org and myxwiki.org.
Let me ask you something: are you willing to put your own money to not only pay for the
hosting but also pay the people to maintain the servers, perform software upgrades, review
what is put on xwiki.org and myxwiki.org everyday, clean it up, spend time monitoring each
wiki to see what it does to ensure it doesn't slow down the rest of the wikis, fight
spam, etc?
Back to the topic, let me know if the sponsors/supporter page would be ok with you?
My point was not so much to have xwiki sas at the bottom of every page (and no there's
no marketing push - I think you're a bit paranoiac here - it was just my own idea, see
the answers from the others btw that should reassure you ;)) than to rightfully thank
someone (whoever that is) when we're using their service/license for free.
I would like to conclude on the fact that from our
previous discussion on
that subject, I had really appreciate your concerns about keeping the
independence of the project from the commercial part of your company, and
your commitment toward the open-source community is a really good example to
follow. I really hope that we will be able to find altogether the best way
to implement your proposal to improve the XWiki Open-Source project as
whole.
Yes I'm confident about this too!
Thanks a lot for your feedback
-Vincent
With kind regards,
--
Denis Gervalle
Softec SA CEO
eGuilde SaRL CTO
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
> Hi everyone (devs and users),
>
> While we have a clear governance for write access to our source
> repository (http://dev.xwiki.org), we're missing a clear governance
> for xwiki.org. The idea is to address mainly the following 2 questions:
> 1) who "owns" it and thus "controls" (or rather provides
direction
> for) its content
> 2) can it be used for business advertising (support, paid packages,
> consulting services)
>
> Bit of History about XWiki SAS
> ========================
>
> - XWiki SAS (http://xwiki.com) is the company founded by Ludovic
> Dubost the creator of XWiki (I'm the CTO of XWiki SAS in addition to
> being a committer here).
> - Most of the active contributors are also employed and paid by XWiki
> SAS to develop the XWiki software. Today that's
> -- 12.5 committers (developers)
> -- 1 open source product manager (see
> http://markmail.org/thread/ggaaw4u6yyci4oan
> for its definition)
> -- 1 designer
> -- 1 tester/technical writer
> - XWiki SAS sells services around the open source software, see
> http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Services/
> - XWiki SAS truly believes and understands open source, see
> http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/About/Values
> -- I also wrote a blog post on this some time back:
> http://massol.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/XWikiSASAndOpenSource
> - XWiki SAS has promised "not to do evil" ;), see its manifesto at
> http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/About/Manifesto
> - XWiki SAS is paying for the servers and maintenance of xwiki.org,
> myxwiki.org, the maven repo, the svn repo, the hudson build serversn
> the free JUG farm, and more
>
> Issue at hand
> ===========
>
> XWiki SAS would like to generate more revenue to be able to increase
> the development pace of the XWiki software. We'd like to fund even
> more the development of XWiki, so that it becomes an even better
> product. We've asked you what you'd like to see in the future in XWiki
> and you've answered on this survey result:
> http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/Features+Survey+Results
>
> We'd like to implement those features as fast as possible.
>
> For this we need to ensure that users interested in commercial
> services find easily the way to http://xwiki.com, even when they
> arrive on xwiki.org.
>
> This is true for XWiki SAS's services but also for any company willing
> to offer services around the XWiki open source project. There's no
> magic. Developers need to be paid when they work full time on some
> project. We need a commercial ecosystem around XWiki for it to
> progress as quickly as its competitors (the collaboration market). We
> need to allow for commercial companies the ability to generate revenue
> from their work on the XWiki open source project. However we also want
> to continue ensuring that all the XWiki development is done in open
> source, under a LGPL license.
>
> Governance Proposal
> =================
>
> 1) xwiki.org is controlled by the XWiki committers. This means that
> important changes brought to it should be discussed/vote on the list,
> using the same practices as for code commits
> 2) xwiki.org stays open in edit mode to all external contributors (and
> XWiki committers continue to monitor it to remove spam, etc)
> 3) we agree to start with 3 zones where companies can advertise their
> commercial offers on top of the XWiki open source product:
> -- On the download page (for business packages, subscriptions, hosting)
> -- On the support page (for services: support, consulting)
> -- (still to be defined) Possibly on a "Products" tab in the new
> horizontal navigation. The idea would be to do as jboss.org is doing.
> Projects are open source and community and Products are commercial
> 4) the company offerings are listed by their amount of contributions
> to the XWiki open source project. The company that contributes most
> (XWiki SAS today) gets the best spots (top of the list, bigger space)
> 5) Companies who want to be listed should provide some proof of their
> contributions to the XWiki open source project
> 6) XWiki SAS gets some acknowledgment for paying for the xwiki.org
> server/maintenance of it. Probably somewhere in the footer of the site
> or on side panel somewhere
> 7) xwiki.org should always remain a site for the xwiki open source
> community
>
> Conclusion
> =========
>
> We want to stress that this proposal is not about XWiki SAS making a
> commercial takeover of the xwiki.org site.
>
> It's about recognizing that if the XWiki open source software
> progresses quickly today, it's thanks to contributors but also for a
> very large proportion to companies paying developers to work on it,
> either directly (like XWiki SAS or other companies that have
> developers contributing) or indirectly (by paying for example XWiki
> SAS or other companies to work on specific features).
>
> It's also about recognizing that XWiki SAS is happy to see other
> companies willing to contribute to the progress of the XWiki open
> source project and thus to provide a place for these companies to be
> visible too.
>
> I hope that all our contributors but also users of the XWiki Open
> Source software will find this proposal acceptable and I welcome any
> feedback on it.
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent Massol
> Hat 1: XWiki SAS CTO
> Hat 2: XWiki committer