And now for the other half. > If FlexWiki is to succeed, IMO, it has to be business-oriented, not a > techy-only thing deployable by the elite few IT people who understand > such stuff.
So I think the question that comes up here is what it means for FlexWiki to "succeed". If I were running FlexWiki like a business, then the definition of "succeed" is pretty obvious: it makes money. At our price point, that model clearly isn't the one we're pursuing. :) In fact, free/open source projects are far more complicated for a number of reasons that I won't rehash here. Read this [1] for an excellent introduction to some of the issues. Eric Raymond is sort of a crackpot, but then again he seems to have his finger on the pulse of open/free software, and I think he nails the dynamic. In part the complications arise from the fact that no one is in charge, and FlexWiki is driven by the collective will of the participants - people that code, people that test, people that use it, people that ask questions, etc. All I can tell you is what *my* goals for FlexWiki are. My primary goals for FlexWiki are simple: have some fun and write a tool that's useful *to me*. Note that nothing about that requires me to share my changes with the world...I'm fortunate enough to have some skill with computers, so I could just go off and do everything I wanted by myself. The license even explicitly allows this. But I thought it would be interesting to contribute back to the community, so I took that on as a task. Because it's fun. Is FlexWiki an awesome product that does everything I want it to? Is it as easy to use as I'd like? No. It works pretty well, but I have ideas for features enough to keep me busy for literally years (I've already devoted nearly four years of my time to the project). And I'm not complaining: I do it, as I said, because it's fun. You compare FlexWiki to Qasper, but I assume you paid your developers to write Qasper. For that, you have a reasonable expectation that you can dictate how they spend their time, what features are priority, etc. etc. We don't have that. We have to beg people to help, and even then they have families and jobs, so we take what we can get in terms of their time..and a huge thanks to all those that have donated time! > Don't get me wrong. FlexWiki has potential, but it is not going to > succeed unless it's made available to a much broader market of both > developers and potential end-users. Again, different definition of success. We've had roughly 80,000 downloads in the last four years just from the SourceForge site (although who knows how many of those have installed). We're probably the most-used C# wiki, though. Channel9, pinvoke.net and a bunch of other big public sites use FlexWiki. But let's say that we were able to multiply our user base by 100. What's the value in it for us? Again: if we're not having fun, then none. > I thought V1.8 was fine, so I'm not sure what you wanted to do in > V2.0. [I was hoping the] product [would be] more useable - friendlier, > with better interfaces and a built-in editor... I started 2.0 with the simple idea that FlexWiki needs a better security model. Unfortunately, the code was not well-factored for adding such a thing. So I refactored it. It took me two years, but now it's *much* easier to add new features. Security was the only goal of 2.0. I finally finished that piece, and now I'm just fixing bugs so that I can get FlexWiki back to the state it was in at the 1.8 release (plus security). The other features you mention are all great ideas, by the way. I'd love to see someone donate the time to make them happen. But I've been the only really active developer for something like, oh, three years now. Not to repeat myself, but a really great way to make things like that happen is to have your company pay someone to donate time: it's win-win because the project gets dedicated time from someone (not just spare time like it gets now) and you get the features that are most important to you. > ...look at this comment on TWiki's site: > > We use TWiki internally to manage documentation and project planning > for our products. said Eric Baldeschwieler, Director of Software > Development of Yahoo! Our development team includes hundreds of people > in various locations all over the world, so web collaboration is VERY > important to us. TWiki has changed the way we run meetings, plan > releases, document our product and generally communicate with each > other. We're great fans of your work! > > That's what I'm talking about - manage documentation and project > planning along with web collaboration. > > Those are the keys I talked about in making FlexWiki a success. > > Now I've never used TWiki since I really want to work with a .NET wiki, > so I have no idea how they handle document uploading and filing and > project setup, but I suspect it's done well, based on the above > comment. > ***************************************************** Yeah, I hear Twiki is really cool. One of the great things about doing this for fun is that I have no problem suggesting that people use other "competing" products. For example, I've heard good things about ScrewTurn wiki. Have you checked it out? It's another .NET open source wiki engine, and apparently it has much better administration and ease-of-use than FlexWiki. I realize that you're trying to integrate FlexWiki into a commercial product - an activity we totally support - and so these features are really important to you. They should be. But you get what you pay for, so maybe you should look elsewhere for the feature set you desire. I'd love it if FlexWiki were everything you want to see, but it isn't, and won't be for a good long while if something doesn't change. To summarize: 1) I think we have different definitions of "success", and 2) your expectations of what FlexWiki should be like are reasonable - commendable, even - but it's not going to happen any time soon unless the level of participation jumps dramatically. [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. 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