New subject: [xwiki-users] [Proposal] New free and community-managed farm on xwiki.org?

22 Jan 2008

Hi Vincent,
People who are interested in free xwiki and want to use it as an
experimental tool can download it and play with it. It costs nothing for
them.
As far as I have seen that students and other such individuals seldom become
paying customers. They typically use for project work etc.

I think hosted solution should focus on paying customers only unless you
want to test the scalability of xwiki real time by giving free access.

Thanks
Sachin

Message: 6
...
  Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:32:41 +0100
 From: Vincent Massol &lt;vincent(a)massol.net&gt;
 Subject: [xwiki-users] [Proposal] New free and community-managed farm
        on      xwiki.org?
 To: XWiki Developers &lt;devs(a)xwiki.org&gt;rg>, XWiki Users &lt;users(a)xwiki.org&gt;
 Message-ID: &lt;AA1B7724-0178-487B-9C9A-B790C670F6FA(a)massol.net&gt;
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes

 Hi everyone,

 Some time back XWiki SAS, the company who started XWiki had a free
 online farm on xwiki.com. This farm was closed for new projects a few
 months ago after XWiki SAS realized it didn't have the manpower (or
 finance) to support it in a professional way. XWiki SAS still has a
 professional farm offering but it's not a free farm (see
 http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Services/#HHosting)
 .

 I'd like to discuss with you the idea of offering a free farm managed
 by the xwiki community and under the xwiki.org umbrella. In essence it
 means there would be 2 farms available:
 * a paying one which is on xwiki.com, for professional needs
 * a free one on xwiki.org for universities, individuals or anyone not
 requiring guaranteed support/availability at all times

 Here's how it would work:

 * No support guarantee. All support done on the xwiki.org user mailing
 list.
 * No stability guarantee. We would always install the latest Platform/
 XE/XEM version on it and it would serve as a stability test for the
 xwiki development team. Obviously the community will always try to
 make it as stable as possible but that's not guaranteed.
 * There will be several members of the community who'll have admin
 access on the farm.
 * We will reduce admin tasks by offering a simple UI on the farm
 itself (restart, see memory stats, see blocking requests, ban a wiki,
 etc)
 * It will be open to anyone. However the target users will be
 technical people who can support themselves to some extent. We won't
 control that but it'll be mentioned on the registration page.

 XWiki SAS would pay for the machine, hosting and the initial
 installation.

 I have 2 questions for you:

 1) As a user of it, would you be interested by such a farm? Do you
 think it's interesting for the xwiki project to have such a free farm?

 2) As a community member, would you be willing to help administer it/
 support it? For this farm to work we need to find several members of
 the xwiki community willing to help administer it. Here are the tasks
 I can think of:
 - work on the welcome page content for the farm
 - work on the FAQ for the farm (like "what do I do if I've lost my
 password", etc)
 - help answer user questions on the list (this can and should be be
 done by everyone)

 Thanks
 -Vincent, with 2 hats: community developer and CTO of XWiki SAS

Re: [xwiki-users] [Proposal] New free and community-managed farm on xwiki.org?