xwiki product and community, ow2con'15, november 17, paris
TRANSCRIPT
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Agenda
1) What the XWiki product is
2) How the product is governed
3) What XWiki SAS is● How the community & the company can live
together● The influence of the company on the project● Example of collaboration: XWiki
Collaborative Suite (XCS)
4) Does it works?
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki product
● Created in 2004 by Ludovic Dubost● Member of OW2● A powerful wiki, in the Java ecosystem● Designed for enterprises● Allow structured data● Can be extended with integrated
scripting capabilities (Velocity, Groovy, JS, etc...)
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki product
● Cover a lot of use-cases:● Knowledge-bases● Work spaces (collaborative editing, meeting
application, polls, forums, file manager...)● Intranet portals● Public websites (CMS)● Etc...
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Mantras
● The best way to organize information & collaborate
● Stop using emails!
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Recent features
● Nested Pages: now a page can have “sub pages” to create hierarchy of pages.
● WYSIWYG editor (upcoming): replace our own editor by CKEditor.
● Going to a minimal distribution that can be extended with “Flavors” of XWiki (optimized for some use-cases)
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Governance
● XWiki.org is an Open Source project● LGPL license● Driven by its community
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
The community
● As many open source projects, our community gets together on the mailing lists.● There are 3 active lists, recently
accumulating 95 messages per day
● 2 main lists:● «users» where users get help from the team● «dev» where developers discuss new
features, technical issues, etc...
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
«Committer»
● A developer who have the right to push commits on the official repository
● But being a «committer» involves more:● Right to vote (when new features are
proposed, when some important changes are going to be made)– It's actually a duty.
● A veto: a committer can «block» a proposal (but he needs to have good reasons)
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Committer
● A committer has also priviligied access to the infra (bug tracker, official website, ci server, github administration, etc...)
● Duty to perform releases (at least one per year)
● Duty to watch everything that happens in the repository and verify its quality.
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Committer
● Duty to look at contributions (Pull Requests, etc...) and apply them if possible
● More generally, discuss about the direction of the project
● And more...● See:
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Committership
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Committership
● Important: all committers have the same rights.
● There is no leader, no boss, no «Benevolent Dictator for Life».
● All the decisions have to be democratically made.
● It's the Apache Software Foundation model.
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
How to become a committer
● When a developer has proved himself (by doing pull requests, etc...), one of the committers can propose to give him the status.
● Then, other committers vote to decide whether or not the candidacy is accepted.
● Newcomers are welcome!
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Roadmap
● Each year, a «roadmap» is discussed by the committers
● Define the objectives for the comming year
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki SAS (my employer)
● XWiki SAS is the company founded by XWiki's creator, Ludovic Dubost.
● Provides support, hosting, and services for clients interested in XWiki.
● Fund some committers (full-time jobs):● Currently 6 committers are salaried of XWiki
SAS ● Most of the work done on the product comes
from these 6 persons
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki SAS
● XWiki SAS also provides:● The infrastructure (servers, etc...)● A «quality team», who is in charge of
testing the new versions of XWiki and contributing to the documentation
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki SAS: angel or devil?
● XWiki SAS plays the game of Open Source
● There is some committers who have no relation with this company● And that is good!
● Some committers are former employees who keep their committer status (the 2 entities are distrinct so it's logical)
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki SAS: angel or devil?
● Once a year, XWiki SAS employees proposes a roadmap but then it's discussed/modified by the committers.● Nothing is imposed!
● XWiki SAS would love to see more companies funding the XWiki.org project: a win/win situation.
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki SAS: angel or devil?
“Since XWiki SAS fund most of the developers, the company must have a great influence on the project...”● Indeed... But other committers have still
veto, and developers from other companies can join the project so that it would be more «balanced».
● The current situation of being the main sponsor is not an objective of the company.
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki SAS: Open Core?
● The company does not apply an «Open Core» strategy. All contributions are free.
● Consequence: the distinct between the project and the company is well managed.● Maybe it could be more explicit by renaming
the project. The question has been asked already.
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki SAS: What is XCS?
● XWiki Collaborative Suite (XCS) is a new project of XWiki SAS (the company).
● It's a distribution of XWiki (the product) packaged with a collection of extensions.
● Including an extension to interact with their (paying) support team.
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki SAS: What is XCS?
● XCS is still not an «Open Core» strategy.● Actually, XCS is open source too (the
source code is available on github)● But this project is not lead by the
community● It has been developed to answer the
XWiki SAS needs for more customized environnement (integration with the XWiki SAS infrastructure, etc...)●
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki SAS: What is XCS?
● XCS is definitively not a danger for the XWiki.org project.
● It's actually a good way to test our extensibility: we try to make the project modular enough so that a lot of different distributions could exists, depending on the users' needs.
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Health
● XWiki.org is healthy:● Mailing lists are active● Frequent releases● A lot of downloads● The XWiki democracy works and we are a
serious product in the competition
11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
Contact
Guillaume Delhumeau● Email: [email protected]
● Website: gdelhumeau.myxwiki.org
● Twitter: @gdelhumeau