Re: [xwiki-devs] Back to the future of XWiki !

Hi Andreas, Le 06/03/11 23:29, Andreas Hahn a écrit : to get better feelings about the ongoing continuity and the direction of the xwiki product. XWiki SAS and the XWiki community. employees of XWiki SAS. This is right. Now not all committers are as tied to XWiki SAS than it might seem. Most of our committers are more tied to the XWiki Open Source product than they are tied to XWiki SAS. the health of XWiki SAS. You might think this shouldn't bother users as this is free software. rise and fall. So the financial background of a supplier - or understanding its business model - is a natural concern for me when beginning to spend time and resources on it. I very much agree. Right now the more XWiki SAS is vital the more XWiki Open Source is vital and we actually want to stay it this way, not withstanding other contributions that there can be around XWiki. My experience has also shown that our company is more committed to the software than service companies using these softwares can be. Our type of organization actuallty creates more stability around the development of Open Source software than many other types, and still it does not restrain the openness nature of the software (which is due to our commitments as a company and to the LGPL licence). xwiki.org the discussions on the boards their focus and priorities the testimonials and claims I doubt that there is a positive cashflow of revenues somehow related to the Xwiki software. Reading between the lines of your postings it seems that also vision has got lost somehow. > I don't mean to be offending - I just try to understand the motivation and/or business model behind it to get a better feeling about the risk of this project being discontinued suddenly. > So far its my impression that the project is financed by some sort of generous patronage - maybe like Mark Shuttleworth of Canoncial who became a happy and generous sponsor of Ubuntu Linux after selling his startup. > I'd be happy to hear your comment on that ;)

--- Note: I'm sharing below information about XWiki SAS. I'm not 100% it is relevant to our community but since Andreas seems to find important to understand how XWiki SAS works relating to XWiki.org, I'm going into this. XWiki SAS want to be not only a "good" open source citizen, it want to be a "great" one. This means that we don't fear showing how we are and how we work and what our motivations are. --- You are actually wrong here. While XWiki SAS is not "rich", XWiki SAS is not "poor" neither "subsidised" the Canonical way or even the way many open source companies are subsidies (which is with VCs). We do have a bit of subsidies: 1/ French state: we gives us some tax cuts and funds research projects. Though this is quite classical in the French way of building tech companies to reduce our non-competitivness when it comes France's tax and social structure. We got currently 30% of our budget payed this way. 2/ Our employees, including me, are making a partial financial sacrifice to work in a company like XWiki, but we are also giving many things including the fact of getting payed to work on Open Source. Once this is said, XWiki is break-even for the last 6 years. Everybody (34 people mostly in France and Romania) gets a decent salary, and all this without external funding except the initial ones from the employees (we invested 200K). We are even more than break-even lately, because we need to fund our reserves of cash flow to manage the growth. And 100% of the XWiki SAS activity is devoted to work around the XWiki software. You can find some information here: http://www.societe.com/societe/xwiki-477865281.html The latest year (soon published) is much better with 850K revenue and benefit. Now not all the XWiki SAS employees are working on the XWiki software directly. Many are working on client projects doing custom development. We have a small support team and we have our hosting and cloud offering. We have the research team that does the funded research projects and we have a marketing team. But all the revenue from these work fund the active development of XWiki, including developers, a usability engineer, a tester, people working on documentation, etc.. The people working on support, hosting, consulting and development also participate when possible to improve the product. The global level of our engineers is quite good, since Google's HR seems to try to pitch them. All in all, I think that XWiki is quite stable. We are able to fund development (although of course we would like to fund more). We have been able to build almost all branches of the development part and we also have done all of the commercial part. I think you are a bit underestimating our success. One of the reasons I think is that we have a bigger success in France (commercially) than in other countries. If there is one thing I think we are a bit slow, it's international. I would like us to be more present in Germany for instance. In France we are doing more and more projects with XWiki and are currently progressively getting in almost any important company (that does not standardize fully on Microsoft) and also many public ministries. As for the vision, it's not that it's lost. In my view, XWiki has been lacking the "good" marketing. The one that allows to match the product better with customers needs, the one that allows to better value our strength. This is due to the fact that XWiki is very "tech" oriented by all means. By getting into "product marketing", that's what I want to work on. This will allow us to better use our "little" (they are always too little) resources on the right stuff. money in a reasonable timeframe I'd go and copycat the atlassian way. AFAIK they are joining forces with some industry heavy weights. I think I remember having read about SAP selling confluence licences and services as a complemantary offer to SAP's existing user base. No surprise that atlassian claims having almost 10.000 installations. If you are interested in this topic I'd write more about what opportunities I can imagine here and what steps can be taken. Of course - developing a business like this is nothing that developers could do as a side job.

This is complicated. It's hard to sell the same price as Atlassian. To do that you need a flawless product which requires no support, which means no revenu from these installs. This is good to get "known" but does not make business. Except for the Cloud offering, which is what we are doing. We are also thinking of a slightly beefed up package only available from XWiki SAS but we lack development time to work on features that don't make sense to go in the core platform (on the other hand we don't want to undermine the platform, so we are more thinking about apps). I also think you are underestimated their joining with SAP. Atlassian mostly sells Confluence to their JIRA customers. They do quite well with their direct model. They are quite focus on the techy world. On the Application/Solution side we have actually some interesting cards to play. Curriki is a very interesting product for eLearning and it is naturally sold with service. So one long term strategy is the core XE/Platform is free and "vertical" apps and "implementation" is "commercial". There are other vertical targets that make a lot of sense. looks far more complicated to me. Blogging software, CMS, wikis - they all are competing for the attention of publishers and there is quite some overlap in functionality - if not in the end they all will be the same. As long as XWiki is not installed by webhosters it means that users have to install the service of their own. Only companies with IT-department and people with IT background can do that which is a severe reduction of the potential user base. But bringing 'collaboration' software to companies is more than a technical issue. Management is involved as it needs to be confident that their companies knowledge is not being shared with the wrong people. You need to build a reputation first to get there - or you are joining forces with other companies that already know the customer and have that reputation see a) Atlassian/SAP - this seems to be far more easy than b) to me. We are less inclined to try to distribute XWiki through hosters, because of our hosting and cloud offering and also because of he fact that most hosters focus on php apps. We can provide VMs for Amazon for sure and we plan to do that. Our experience shows that it's less expensive for us to support a client on our own hosting than to support him on his hosting.

At this point we plan to provide VMs with support as a sellable package by XWiki SAS. We also think that this is a good package to propose through partners (resellers in different countries). So to summarize we a few big plans 1/ Our Cloud offering 2/ An AppStore with apps 3/ A packaged offering with apps available for customers and partners as VMs, etc.. 4/ Higher end Open Source solutions: education, etc.. one has not even been mentioned. sort of compatible with page layout software like Artisteer. boring now so please read my old postings on it. support more options. help better promoting the software - http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/videos/overview.jsp recognized media instead of the mailing list (for example stackoverflow.com)

I've been thinking about getsatisfaction.com. Balasamiq seems to have quite a success with it. WDYT ?

understand it might take a while until i find the time to respond. I hope I gave you some good grounds to believe in XWiki's future success. Any contribution on how to improve all parts of XWiki is always welcome. Ludovic more of it. development. which means making a better product which fits more the market needs. product and making it more mainstream. it. If it means working on distribution this goes beyond "Product Marketing", though I'm also interested into that. have spend the XWiki SAS marketing efforts more into showing a 'professional' face to potential customers, we plan to invest more time in open source marketing. As Vincent points outs this is also a collective effort as there is nobody better than our committers to get XWiki known in the tech world. "wordpress" but even if we can do some things that wordpress is used for, this is not what we are good at, and wordpress does not do what XWiki does. market. That's what XWiki is good at. It's not any kind of collaboration, as XWiki's way of collaboration is different than what people have been used to. since these tools build public web sites and this automatically extend their reach. in collaboration, interested in bringing their organization to that type of collaboration. and "communication" as you mentionned, but I also believes it requires more work on our end on XWiki itself. more democratize it, simplify it for newcomers, making it's powerfull features more accessible to newcomers. 1, is it's internal Class/Object system which allows to create new data structures from the web. Unfortunately this feature requires a too steep learning curve. system XWiki should always have had. feature. It's THE "modern" way of configuring a home page for basic users. we also have plenty of refinements to do that will complete XWiki for it's "purpose", and for what it's differentiated from other tools. and in distribution and communication to make XWiki more popular and widespread. you refer to the "feature" survey. Actually the current "feature survey" did include "VM" distribution. survey", to actually discuss what we should spend our effort on for XWiki. on, please bring them on. trends says. http://www.google.com/trends?q=xwiki%2C+foswiki%2C+twiki%2C+confluence wish prosperous future. more priorities. Amazon EC2) XWiki Open-Source took a Gregory's customers and Product work on XWiki's product implement in the than