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

Hi Andreas, everyone On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 10:48 AM, Andreas Hahn <ahahn(a)gmx.net> wrote: "confluence" is a word of the English language, it makes this chart off by far. This one would be a bit more relevant in my opinion : http://www.google.com/trends?q=xwiki%2C+atlassian%2C+mindtouch& but I still don't think it means that much. Ludovic will probably answer this for himself, but as a quick remark I think you've misinterpreted his mail. He doesn't say he will come back as a developer, but only as a Product Marketing lead, thus working close to developers and the community, because, well, that's how (real) open source software is developed. I think this vision is not complete. Cloud and hosted software got a lot of attention lately, but in-house software is not dead yet. Maybe in a couple of years in-house will mean "deployed on a private cloud", but we are still far from here, we would have first to see a complete, mature, open source cloud solution emerge, and have organizations deploy it on their infrastructures. I think we are speaking of half a decade here, so we have time to try and not miss that train :) In the mean time, I think XWiki's greatest challenge is to become the de-facto standard in the enterprise open source stack when speaking collaboration. Right now we are not badly positioned when speaking of "collaborative edition/redaction". We need to affirm this position and push it further to "collaboration" in a larger meaning (without trying to be the solution to everything or a social network tool, because that's not what XWiki is). Now I agree with you, it would be of course a good thing to have the EC2 distribution, the VMWare images and be present in more online offerings etc. Just I think it's not absolutely critical versus making XWiki a product so great that it just becomes a logical choice for collaboration. I also agree having easy installs on linux would be great to increase visibility. But as a I understand, the cost of packing java apps for linux is quite high. This is why you don't see packages even for popular java (web) applications. Trying to replace all blogs out there by XWiki is not going to help too much IMHO. Even if we geeks like it to use our toy for absolutely everything, for the rest of the world, XWiki remains mainly a professional software for doing collaborative edition. That was my 2 cents. Not trying to just "defend my turf" as one of the developer of XWiki, but rather trying to balance the vision that says we need to be very strong on the web / commercial clouds to win. There already have been some success stories of open source end-user applications (in the sense: not infrastructure apps) a la Alfresco, Liferay, Zimbra, etc. I think XWiki is a candidate for such, even if we are not there yet. The important part in my opinion is building a great product, the rest will come naturally. That's why having strong product marketing with Ludovic being active on features investigation and design make sense and will be a good thing in my opinion. Jerome.