WillThisFlameWarEverEnd

It's getting on my nerves. Everytime there's a discussion that is somehow related to the issues between TDO, TWikiDotNet and WikiRing (and it's consultants) someone starts the flaming again.

Right now I'm in the TWiki project because I like the product and the people I've met in Rome on IRC or somewhere else who like/love TWiki even more than me.

I'm not earnig money from doing TWiki stuff. I'm not working for a company that uses TWiki anymore. I do it for the fun.

But this fun is about to end quite soon if this stupid he said this to me on email and the but he said this before replies won't stop. The sad thing about it is that I met both parties in person already, and I could not really believe what happend here between those parties on TDO in the last couple of weeks.

If this continues we have a loose/loose/loose situation and our already small community will become even smaller.

If this is your goal, please continue. Youre doing quite good already...

-- Contributors: CarloSchulz - 18 Feb 2008

Discussion

Answer: yes. Just keep cool.

-- MichaelDaum - 18 Feb 2008

I do not see any problem, if somebody wants to get out some advertising for his efforts he invests in TWiki. I like what I saw in the last weeks. Both: TWiki as a product and TWiki as a community. There is light!

-- MartinSeibert - 18 Feb 2008

When elephants fight, only the grass gets trembled. Yeah, I know, it's the same when they make love .. but I'd prefer it that way 'round anyway ..

(Sad to learn that you switched company / your company stopped using TWiki, hope it'll work out for the best.)

-- SteffenPoulsen - 18 Feb 2008

Carlo, i believe this is more than just a flamewar. Having said that though, you are quite right it should stop, and i'm willing to take my responsibility in this.

Let me just make one thing clear: I spend hours on irc, helping out new users setting up their TWiki, helping new developers finding their way around the code. I try to commit my code back to the project by following the proper procedures. I've been present at almost every single marketing meeting we have had since Rome. I'm strengthening the Dutch community by organising meetups and trying to get people to blog about their projects. I contribute to Codev a lot, with new topics and comments.

Do I get any money for that? No, I'm not in it for the money. Sure, I have some TWiki projects professionally. But if I were just in it for the money, I would use the software, use the community to get my questions answered and the software developed, and maybe show up on a meetup or two to do some marketing, maybe get some sales leads. I wouldn't do all the things mentioned above. I do all that in my own free time, when no-one is paying me to do so. I never even tried to plug my own company on any meetup, it would not even feel right to me.

Sure, I may have done a stupid thing in the PostgreSQL incident, I regret that. I had no idea it would blow up at that time. There is a tendency to overreact lately, that is a direct consequence of the things that are at stake: large amounts of money being invested, huge amounts of time already invested. In both cases involved parties want to see a return on their investment.

Let me conclude that I feel we are probably all taking things a bit too seriously lately. Let's get back the fun! From that, the rest will follow. I'm sure.

-- KoenMartens - 18 Feb 2008

That there are disagreements and less than generous interpretations of statements between long standing, and not new contributors to TWiki shows that there are deep seated, and important unresolved non-technical issues.

I'm reminded of PleaseEmpowerYourContributors in 2003, and similar elephants throughout TWiki's 10 year history - that one leading me to join the core team, push hard to create the CairoRelease, and then work to bring in the DevelopBranch - the first iteration of the SVN workflow that we have today.

The thing that worries me the most, is that it is mostly longer term contributors that consider there to be a serious problem that needs resolving, and the newer ones that don't (I'm massively generalizing).

I'm a software engineer - I don't really want to see anything but technical discussion in Codev either, but I can't help thinking that an issue that comes up every 6-12 months requires serious re-architecting.

-- SvenDowideit - 18 Feb 2008

In my beliefs only face-to-face time is what can improve on this - easier to just let time fly than to resolve issues here in the virtual world. Hooray for the summits!

-- SteffenPoulsen - 19 Feb 2008

I think we should seriously shift our energy and effort into something more productive, e.g. the architecture of twiki, documentations, organisation, overall well being of twiki. Rather than whatever that's happening.

Though healthy discussions are important. e.g. the PostgreSQL incident was quite fruitful in the way that it enables us to understand what we may have seriously misunderstood about their habitat. In fact, do any of us put in serious effort (rather than 10mins or browsing), to understand how other OSS projects live? I think some of us may have started out from the wrong platform where we neglected the contextualisation of the so-called "solution" and lack the wisdom to discern its essence to TWiki.

Just my 2 rupees.

-- KwangErnLiew - 19 Feb 2008

I still think that a certain amount of discussions about non-hacking stuff is needed as the arrival of TWikiDotNet has got such a big impact on the TWikiCommunity. Things did not work out as smoothly as intended. Question is: why. Let's keep the heat low while focusing on this as well.

-- MichaelDaum - 20 Feb 2008

In answer to your question, Kwang, the answer is yes. I have talked to a member of the Ubuntu project about the way in which they manage the relationship between their CommerceAndCommunity (in their case Canonical Ltd.) and wrote it up on the LearningFromUbuntu topic. In fact, you commented on the topic saying that Zope may be a better example to learn from. I am not sure if I would encourage you to write a LearningFromZope topic since I am not sure how much my LearningFromUbuntu topic has actually been absorbed by the community. Judging by the way in which the recent TWiki world summit did not come up with any output relating to community governance, I would say that my Ubuntu topic has had zero affect.

-- MichaelCorbett - 20 Feb 2008

To learn, one must rightly ask relevant questions. Let's start by asking questions, shall we? With a standardised set of questions, and a range of case studies, we can pretty much narrow down what is relevant to TWiki's ecosystem. At the moment, I don't see any set of questions that aids in our decision making of what's relevant to TWiki.

IMHO, maybe we missed that crucial step.

-- KwangErnLiew - 20 Feb 2008