I've been waiting for an appropriate moment to join this collection
of threads, and this paragraph below feels like it provides that
moment. Before I get into that, though, I'd first like to say:
It's a curious thing that Eric's expression of a need to ensure his
livelihood somehow managed to devolve into a huge pile of complaining,
demanding and introspection on what's wrong with the tiddly* community.
At such times I would think it far better to celebrate and remind
ourselves of the huge contributions that Eric has made over the years to
the community. His work on creating, maintaining and documenting plugins
is second to none and his efforts to ensure that the TiddlyWiki core
keeps its promises have been outstanding, even if the face of sometimes
different priorities from elsewhere.
So, congratulations to Eric on his many years of work. I'm confident
that as a community we will be able to work out ways to ensure that
he can continue to contribute.
I hope that's not at all controversial. The controversial part comes
next, below:
On Thu, 10 Nov 2011, Miles Fidelman wrote:
At some point, Tiddly is going to live or die by whether or not the folks
most committed to it find a long-term model for supporting the software and
themselves.
I completely disagree with this, and I think it is the prevelance of
this attitude in this thread which has contributed to me becoming
angry and finding it hard to find a way into the thread that is
clear and focused.
Tiddly lives and dies by the efforts of its community. Not by
business, business interests, or even leaders.
Tiddly is a thing in its own right with a community of participants
who all have free and easy access to:
* create documentation
* contribute code
* report bugs
* demonstrate cool functionality
In one of his earlier message Miles asks that Tiddly be more like,
e.g., Linux.
Back when I first started using Linux, I guess in about 1992, maybe
93, Linus and a few core devs were responsible for making patches
and distributing tarballs. I installed Linux via SLS, a distribution
packaged by someone who was not Linus nor one of those core devs.
Later as the community grew someone got the bright idea to start the
Linux Document Project (source of Howtos and the like). That wasn't
a core dev either.
A while later I was using Linux to run an ISP. We had features that
we needed in the packages that ran our services. We mades patches to
apache, qpopper, PAM, innd and contributed them back to the
communities that surrounded them. My employer, the ISP, paid me to
make those contributions back to the free (as in beer) software that
made our business possible.
TiddlyWiki is rather unique in its nature as a standalone piece of
software. It is less easy to connect back to a community than say
something like Apache or Linux. This does not, however, obviate the
responsibility the community has to the health of TiddlyWiki itself
and the TiddlyWiki community.
I'm not sure when it happened (because I have not been observing the
community for that long) but at some point the TiddlyWiki community
stopped operating as one. Perhaps it was when Osmosoft was bought by
BT. It sometimes seems like at that point people decided "oh there
is money now, BT will take care of it."
That's never been the case and never should have been the case. BT
bought Osmosoft to understand open source operations yet bizarrely
TiddlyWiki has become less and less operational as an open source
project since the purchase.
BT's engagement with TiddlyWiki ought to be much like the ISP
(above) engaging with various software: It contributes back to the
community those improvements which it finds valuable to itself. For
example BT wanted a certain type of server-side so they paid me to
make one (more on TiddlyWeb below).
The maintenance of the community, though, should have been and needs
to be (for the sake of just distribution of power) done by the
community and the simple truth is this has not happened. There are
presumably a few reasons for this. Some of it is that perceived
"leaders" didn't step up in an effective fashion:
* When Jeremy was sucked up by the BT spaceship his availability
vaporized. Perhaps that will change now with his recent news.
* Martin, who has been the inside Osmosoft lead of TiddlyWiki
development, has not engaged the community with alacrity.
* Eric, though his contributions are extremely valuable, insists on
keeping them in a format that is not accessible to open source
processes such as version control, forking, patching, issues
tracking, etc. Nor has he, despite many invitations, become a
proper contributor in the core code, using git etc.
* Those of us with monetary relationships with Osmosoft (me, Ben,
Jon, Colm, once upon a time FND, but no longer) have
resposibilities which do not prioritize TiddlyWiki but instead
business goals given to them by the people with the money and
their own developing careers.
* The (probably unrealistic) expectation that UnaMesa, in addition
to providing hosting for things like trac.tiddlywiki.org, would
provide human engagement in the community, went unfulfilled.
Some of it is that the combination of those 5 items above created a
space that looked like it was going to be filled at any moment, so
other participants need not apply or try.
Some of it has been a perception that TiddlyWeb and TiddlySpace were
taking some of the energy. I don't think that's true at all. TWeb
and Space don't change TiddlyWiki. And you do not dimish a candle by
lighting another. These projects can coexist but in order for them to
do so the expectation that people working on only one or two of the three
is somehow taking away from the other must go away. For example I
don't work on TiddlyWiki. I just don't. I'm not supposed to and nor
do I want to. That's not wrong. That just is. There are plenty of
other people in the world who _do_ work on TiddlyWiki.
But, I'd argue, in the end it is because the community of users that
surround tiddly* didn't just do it themselves. That's what open source
really means. It doesn't mean getting free stuff. It means signing up
for a club in which in exchange for providing your expertise (whether it
be testing, developing, writing, explaining, promulgating, or simply
being a positive force of feedback and encouragement (btw, an aspect
which people way undervalue and should not)) you get legitimate access
to use some free stuff and the free expertise of the community.
Everything that TiddlyWiki needs to be a fully operational and
working open source community is available for free: source control,
websites, wikis, mailing lists. If things aren't the way you want
them to be, then please, gather some comrades and fix it. Fixing it
can be as much as the whole kit, or it can be as simple as making
sure that the issues you have are more accurately reported in the
issue trackers associated with the projects. It's in _your_ hands.
Which leaves me to talk a bit about TiddlyWeb. It's been suggested
that it is:
* too hard and too inaccessible (by virtue of power, complexity and
language choice)
* that is it not powerful enough (by not engaging in things like
federated wiki)
* that it violates some principle of how tiddlers ought to be
Perhaps, but TiddlyWeb is in fact exactly what it was designed to
be. It is an implementation of an idealized HTTP API for accessing,
storing and composing tiddlers on the web that is designed for
maximum flexiblity and general usefulness for creating
tiddler-based web applications. Note I say "tiddler", not
"tiddlywiki".
By which I mean that it, by design:
* uses a readable programming language
* has a plugin architecture that lends itself to open source
development and visibility
* prioritizes inspection of the code over simple installation (even
though installation is one step on mature systems)
* allows tiddlers to be represented in many ways, not just in
TiddlyWiki
The end result is a toolkit for collaborating via tiddlers but it is one
that considers itself at least as much an education and uplift tool as a
useful piece of software. The original description was that TiddlyWeb
would be a reference implementation of the API, leading to other
implementations, from the community if they were interested, that were
more suited to particular environments, such as installing on PHP
hosting services.
So to join this last section of the message to the first: If
TiddlyWeb is not what you want it to be, you have the power to
influence it, to change it, or even to ignore it. You. The same goes
for TiddlyWiki and TiddlySpace. This is both the blessing and the
curse of _real_ open source projects.
I very much want all the tiddly* projects to be real open source
projects. With active and diverse contributions from the entire
community. It is very clear from the messages in recent days that
there are loads of really good ideas on how things ought to be. As a
community we need to turn these conversations into action.
I hope very much that we hear from Jeremy, Eric and Martin on these
issues very soon. Their involvement is not critical to success but
their expertise will certainly make it easier.
--
Chris Dent http://burningchrome.com/
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