[xwiki-devs] State of the XWiki Community

Hi Community, The following message expresses my personal opinions as a member of the community, so it might not be entirely accurate. The goal is to start a discussion about how can we attract more contributors and committers to the XWiki open source project, and will address three main subjects: - the current state of the community and committers - the possibility of joining or creating a non-profit foundation to govern XWiki - the possibility of using Fundry as a way for users to fund XWiki development ----- Status of the community At the start of a new year, it's time to look a bit at the status of XWiki, the project and the community. XWiki was created by Ludovic Dubost as an open source project from the start. Later, he founded a commercial company (XWiki SAS, back then XPertNet SaRL) as a way to financially support the development of the product. It kept the project entirely open, unlike the many false open source companies that only offer a basic open source version, forcing people to buy the commercial one (the open core model), or that only release the source code while still doing behind-the-curtains development, or that almost completely ignore the outside community. See the XWiki SAS values: http://purl.org/xwiki/sas-values and manifesto: http://purl.org/xwiki/sas-manifesto The committers, elected for their merit, and not made automatically as employees of the company, always tried to maintain a healthy community and attract new contributors/committers. Thus, the XWiki software is developed not by the XWiki SAS company, but by the XWiki community. http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Community/ has a lot of information about the community, and the development process. As of January 2011, there are 16 core committers, 12 of which are XWiki SAS employees, and 3 are or were related to XWiki SAS one way or another. http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Community/HallOfFame#HCoreCommitters A big part of the development is aided by non-committer members of the community, either by providing patches, testing and reporting bugs, requesting new features, providing feedback, answering on the mailing lists, etc. As committers, we tried to listen to the community when developing the project, but as paid employees we have to also listen to the company requirements. With a limited manpower it's very hard to evolve as fast as the community would want, or in all the directions that the community wants. And we welcome any help here. The project is healthy, we have regular and frequent releases, with visible progress with each new release (see Vincent's statistics on http://massol.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Blog/XWikiIn2010 for more details). Still, I'm a little disappointed with the development speed. Lately, out of the 16 committers on average about 3-4 are actually available for platform development during a day. * How can we help speed up the growth of the community? * How can we attract more developers outside XWiki SAS? ----- Joining/forming a free software foundation One possible reason while so few people are willing to become committers could be that XWiki SAS might appear to over-control the software, and a clear non-profit foundation on top of XWiki might make it more obvious that XWiki is a true open source project, and anybody is welcome to join. XWiki SAS is a member of the OW2 consortium http://ow2.org/ , and this membership also extends a bit to the XWiki project. OW2 used to host all our infrastructure, SVN, mailing lists, downloads... Currently only the official downloads linked from the main download page are hosted on OW2 servers, as we've gradually moved parts of the development infrastructure on servers provided by XWiki SAS. While OW2 is a great home for XWiki SAS, it's mostly a company consortium, not a software development foundation. The most development help coming from OW2 consists of research projects involving both OW2 and XWiki SAS, thus the OW2 membership doesn't bring much value when it comes to code. One option is to form an XWiki non-profit Foundation, which will govern all XWiki-related software development. The main disadvantage would be that there's a risk that it won't make any difference at all, while adding the burden of more paperwork. This is where your opinion comes into play, since there's no point in doing all the hard work if the community doesn't see a clear benefit in it. The Apache Foundation has the huge disadvantage that it requires a license change, but it's a very well known home for software development, with good visibility. The Software Freedom Conservancy has been getting a lot of press recently, since several high profile projects joined it. It's got a few top-notch projects under its hood, so XWiki would be among well known projects in there. A smaller, compatible alternative is Codehaus, but I'm not convinced they would make a difference with respect to our needs. Other foundations aren't really suited for XWiki, since they either don't bring value to the community because they don't foster inter-project collaboration (SourceForge, Google Code), or don't match the project goals (FSF, GNU, Eclipse, Linux, Mozilla...). So, some questions in regard to this subject: * Is there anybody that would like contribute more / become a committer? * Do users believe that a foundation on top of XWiki will help attract more developers? Please note that this is not THE discussion about which foundation to join, just trying to see if there is a benefit in doing so. ----- Supporting code development Becoming a committer requires time, and few people can spend that time when there's no direct benefit involved. XWiki SAS employees are already being paid to work with XWiki, so they can contribute to the platform because the company benefits directly from their work. Employees of other companies that deal with XWiki do spend time contributing, but very few actually got to hang around enough to be voted as committers, although many came close, but stopped short of it. One way of supporting code development is to contact XWiki SAS and sign a contract to develop one or more features with a higher priority. An alternative, which allows to share the cost with other companies/individuals, is to collaboratively request and support feature development (crowdfunding), for example through Fundry, a new site especially designed for this. I've set up an account for XWiki at https://fundry.com/project/58-xwiki . This is also a good place to donate to the XWiki project, since there are no visible ways to financially support the project. Fundry would allow to gather financial incentives for non-employees to contribute more code, thus involving the community more in the direction the software evolves, and attracting more potential contributors. * Do you (the community) think this is a good idea and it would help? * Would you be willing to contribute/donate to the project? ----- Please provide us with your feedback, so we can advance on these topics. Thanks, -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/