After increasing our headcount sixfold since 2007 (from 5 to more than 30 employees), XWiki SAS has moved to a new, larger office more suitable to our needs. 

Our new address is located in the heart of Paris :

XWiki SAS
35/37 rue Beaubourg
75003 Paris
FRANCE

Our phone and telecopy numbers are still the same.

We thank our customers for trusting us with their projects, allowing us to grow sustainably for the past 7 years. We look forward to helping them build tomorrow's collaboration and communication tools from our new desks.

We spent the last 5 years in a cosy office in Pernety. This office served us well, and it was there where great memories were created. Although we’re going to miss it,  we definitely love our new, bigger office!

Two things we love about the new office: 

• Space: it is much (much!) bigger than our old office. We can all work better more comfortably: our new office features a relaxing room, 3 meeting rooms, a kitchen as well as a lunch room 
• Location: we're in a great location, just 5 minutes walk from Châtelet - it's very easy to find
• The lamp: Ludovic has built an awesome logo lamp that stands proudly in the conference room

We would like to address our resounding thanks to everyone who helped build up and arrange everything in the office.

Our new office in pictures:

As users or customers of Open Source software, we don't always see that there are different types of Open Source. The license is one key element of differentiation, since it gives the user different rights. I won't discuss the licensing per se in this post, but will discuss the different business models adopted by companies creating Open Source software.

It's been quite clear for any person analyzing the Open Source business, that releasing software as Open Source is a great way to gain traction and adoption, and that the more permissive your license is, the more adoption you can get. This is of course only true if your software is interesting in itself (I'll have another post on that).

When you create a company, you know you can't live just from creating software and releasing it for free. There will be a need to finance the development of the software, as well as the employees of the company. I'm separating these two because the development of Open Source software is not entirely funded by the company, and the bigger your community is, the bigger is the share of the software that's financed without relation to the company.

I will also look only at the business models of companies built around one software product, which is the sole business the company is in. However there are other business models built around working with multiple Open Source software products, which are different from having your sole revenue coming from one software product.

A few business models are available to companies that want to live based on the Open Source software they create:

• providing services and support on top of a fully open source software with a permissive license and that is downloadable for free
• providing a branded version of the open source software (not downloadable for free, but still open source) similar to the RedHat model
• providing a proprietary license of the open source software (called Dual License)
• providing an enhanced proprietary version of the open source software (called Open Core)
• or a combination of all

Each of these models have advantages and drawbacks when it comes to adoption and generating revenue streams.

In the Services model, all the software is open source, the source available on the net, and the software freely downloadable, while all the revenue is generated by services (including Cloud offerings).

In the RedHat model, the adoption is reduced, as there is no download (RedHat relies on the Fedora community for adoption), but it makes it more complicated for customers to use the full RedHat software for free, which generates more revenue streams.

The principle of the dual license is to limit the usage rights of the software by opting for a less permissive license (GPL or AGPL), use the traction of the Open Source community (so there is still adoption), while generating revenue streams when the user wants to combine the software with proprietary software. This solution also reduces competition by limiting the ability for competitors to add proprietary modules to the software, while the copyright owner can do it. This is why often this model is combined with the Open Core model explained below.

The Open Core model is about having a less featured version that is Open Source on any license, including very permissive ones, while the main developer of the software has an enhanced version of the software, which is proprietary. The enhanced version can also be serviced on the cloud.

All these models are Open Source in the sense that at least a share of the software is Open Source. A little analysis of the history of Open Source companies show that there is a tendency to start with the most open model, so that traction and adoption are high, and then later move to one of the subsequent models. This is not very different from web services being offered for free, without ads, and then offering a choice of ads, additional services or even stripping the free service all together.

So if you are a user planning to invest in installing an Open Source software, or even decide to participate in the community and help the development of the Open Source software, you need to make sure that you are investing in the right solution, namely a solution where your investments are protected. This means you hope the software will still exist, still be open source, will be actively developed and that the community will still be thriving.

There is nothing wrong in itself for a company to make its model evolve. What is wrong however is to mislead the users in thinking that the "open" model will be sustained. Users need to be informed what options are considered to monetize the open source software in the future. Businesses are not non profits, and it's normal that they look for profit, but it's not ethical to look for optimization of the revenue stream at any cost, and particularly at the cost of having mislead the users. Note that if it's a survival issue it's another story, but in most cases it is not, it is purely optimization and that was often the plan since the beginning.

Moreover, I believe that the Open Core and Dual Licensing models hold in very high risks themselves of progressively having the company direct most of its investments towards the proprietary business. With the Open Core business model the maximization of profits will mean pushing more and more to undermine the Open Core component and make it less ready to use, so that the relative value of the non open source version will look better. Even if the proprietary modules are small in size and additions on top of the base product, there are risks of slipping towards more and more proprietary. With the Dual Licensing model, there are revenue streams from OEMs and this can create significant revenue streams, like the MySQL business has shown. Unfortunately the slip towards Open Core is easy. This is visible in Oracle's latest move of creating proprietary extensions (http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2011/09/oracle-adding-close-source-extensions.html). Interestingly in this case MySQL used to have a shareholder agreement forbidding it, but this agreement didn't survive the takeover. With this model, since the rights are fully owned by the Dual License holder, the non Open Source version is not even a creation on top of the Open Source version, but it's merely a fork, for which the copyright holder is the only creator, thus reducing competition.

Moreover, what is really bad, is that when the company starts to slip it's model towards a more closed approach, the contributors either move away from the software for another more open software, or fork the code base into a competitive software. A more open approach will always bring more contributors.

The other two models I described don't have this issue of slipping to proprietary as long as the license used does not allow closing the software later on (GPL and LGPL without Dual Licensing are such licenses, while BSD or ASL type licenses allow to close the software later on). I like to say that these models are "Real Open Source", although in this case the "Real" is more about sustainability. 

As I said there is nothing wrong with deciding to opt for these business models, but what is wrong is to change and close progressively the model. This is why users should be aware of the model used by companies, of their commitment to these models and of the possibilities the companies have to close the software. This won't fully guarantee the sustainability, as the company can also fail, but at least they won't be disappointed when seeing the company close-source a software which was perfectly sustainable. Unfortunately many companies use the buzzword "Open-Source" to make themselves look "Open" whatever the amount of Open Source code and whatever the long term intentions are. It would be interesting for the level of commitment to be disclosed.

This has motivated XWiki SAS to publish its code using the LGPL license, without Dual Licensing, to have binary downloads of our software that are fully usable in production with a very simple installation process, to commit to our model in our Manifesto, and to support the reversibility of our cloud offering, allowing to install the same version locally as open source software. These commitments put XWiki SAS in the first category of the described business models. However, we don't exclude using part of the RedHat model for some additional modules or to package a branded version of our software, but we are committed to having this software fully open source.

Ludovic DUBOST
XWiki Founder and XWiki SAS CEO

Since the end of 2011, our CEO, Ludovic Dubost published several articles on XWiki, on the creation of the company, on the decisions and choices that were made and he shared many times his vision as an entrepreneur and a manager. If you missed them, here is the list!

• Why Open Source in this Cloud World?
• Tech companies, the buyout
• Choosing a business model and sticking to it until further notice
• Chasing the future at XWiki
• Building to last: The Objectives
• Building to last: Why XWiki SAS will remain an independent company

More to come!

About a month ago, the Luxembourg YaJUG invited Vincent Massol, our CTO, to present XWiki to a crowd of Java specialists. This presentation not only brought us some great leads, but on this occasion Yannick Kirschhoffer created a very cool poster containing a concept design of a lamp representing the "X" in our logo.

Everyone at XWiki SAS loved it and the immediate reaction of the team was to want to build the XWiki Lamp.

This year, the XWiki Iasi team was happy to participate to 2 career events happening in the same week:

• JobShop - career event addressed to students and graduates (2nd - 7th of April);
• Job Shadow Day - event addressed to students from Computer Science Highschool (5th of April).

On Monday, April 2nd, opening day of the JobShop Event, Marius Florea represented XWiki by being one of the 6 speakers at the  "Succesful Career" activity. Marius presented his evolution in the professional life and his main responsibilities within XWiki, offering students an insight view of the R&D Engineer mission in our company. During the presentation, he highlighted the importance of the education, of perseverance and hard work, insisting both on the importance of the quality of the work done and on the role that passion plays in someone's career decisions. After the presentation, the speakers were invited to answer some questions of the audience and also to give a feedback on the aspects to take into account in order to build a successful career. 

On Wednesday, 4th of April, the XWikiers participated to two activities: Presentation Booth and BACo (BEST Academics & Companies). Early in the morning, the team gathered around to prepare a friendly environment at the booth so that they could give a warm welcome to the students and graduates. After the official opening, during almost 7 hours students interacted with different members of the team and got to know more both about the company and the job openings that we have opened ( Front - End Developer and QA Engineer ). 

Meanwhile, at 2pm, 3 of the XWikiers (Ecaterina Moraru, Eduard Moraru and Raluca Stavro) met the students and the University representatives at BACo activity, to discuss both about the educational process and the methods of improving it and the actions that companies can actively do in order to increase the personal and professional development of the future employees for the work market. The XWikiers spoked about our company's involvement in the students' development, highly emphasising on education and constant development, as well as on expressing creativity. They talked about the courses hold at the Computer Science Faculty by some of our colleagues, the internships available both internally and through the Erasmus program, about XWiki's yearly participation to Job Shadow Day and, of course, to the GSoC event, at which some of the XWikiers are being mentors for a couple of years now.

The day ended with a very nice group photo with all the participants, with champagne and cake from the JobShop organizers!

On Thursday, 5th of April, the XWiki team welcomed at Iasi Office Dacian and Vlad, students at the Computer Science Highschool "Grigore Moisil", who were interested in learning more about Web Development & Web Design. At 10.00 a.m., Job Shadow Day started at our office! Silvia, Diana and Raluca showed them around the office and introduced the guys to the team, made a presentation of the company and talked about life at XWiki. Afterwards, Oana gave details about her responsibilities as a Web Developer at XWiki, Flavius revealed some tips on Front-End Development, while Raluca, Edy and Caty discussed with them about what a career in the web domain means. As the students showed themselves in Web Design, Max revealed them some of his design magic and also gave feedback on some of the work that they have already done. At the end of the day, Dacian and Vlad received some XWiki goodies from the team!

Finally, on Saturday, 7th of April, Raluca, Marius, Caty and Edy hold the technical training "Development process, the XWiki way" , to which participated around 20 students willing to learn more about the tools used within XWiki. The XWikiers talked about what XWiki is, how a new feature is added, the implementation and the release process, outlining the role that Maven, Git, JIRA, Jenkins and Eclipse play in the XWiki development process. 

The day ended with a nice barbecue, XWiki Iasi Team celebrating the end of a busy, but very productive week!

Diana Garneata

When speaking of Enterprise Software, everybody talks about the Cloud, the Cloud, the Cloud. It's today's buzzword. The new gold rush. 

There are plenty of good reasons why companies can be interested in cloud offerings. Similarly there are plenty of good reasons for providers to be delivering solutions through the cloud. 

One of the questions that is frequently asked is whether the "old" way can still be successful. The same matter was brought into discussion during the e-commerce boom. At the time "bricks and mortars" where opposed to Internet's pure players. History has shown however that there was room for both types of players and that offline players benefited from additional growth by creating an online presence. New companies were developing original business models in which, since day one they were combining their online presence with physical locations.

It's the same for Enterprise Software. There will be room for everybody and everything that exists need not be thrown away. 

The more interesting question is whether Open Source is still relevant in the cloud. At XWiki, we actually believe it's more relevant than ever. There are many reasons why Open Source is compelling in the software business. Let's just take a couple:

• from the vendor's side, because of the low sales cost
• from the customer's side, because of the lower lock-in for the customer

(To avoid debates with Open Source critics we're not talking about how the product gets better thanks to the community or about its openness.)

From the vendor side, Cloud is not a panacea. While you can indeed get lower sales costs when you manage to get your software to "sell itself", in the initial stages of development it won't be that easy, as a lot of marketing is needed to make the product known. Additionally, the initial revenue per client will have to be quite competitive, which will make funding R&D difficult, unless you raise a lot of capital.

We've seen that with Open Source software we get lower sales costs with bigger project sales per client (including support and services contracts). In the initial stages this drives funding to the R&D. It continues to be the case as you grow the business. You'll still need to add features to the product and the Open Source side of the business will mostly fund this work, while the cloud business will reuse that work to drive additional revenue. In this sense Cloud and Open Source are perfect matches.

From the customer's side, in the 1990s, Open Source gained a lot of traction not only because of the low costs, but also because of proprietary software companies starting to abuse their lock-in position. These companies were increasing prices and they were not giving anything back to clients, even though production costs had diminished as a result of scaling (one just needs to look at Microsoft's financial results to see that they made absolutely no efforts in this area). Open Source software allowed companies to invest progressively once they had new needs. After the value of the software was confirmed, they'd be able to decide to invest more by buying Enterprise Support or additional services. In the Cloud, the "lock-in" situation is much more worse. Imagine complaining about a bill to your online cloud email provider who tells you to pay or he will cut the connection. With enterprise software, you might have gone off support, but at least in most cases you would have "acquired" the licence, so you would not be cut off. Also Cloud providers have full control of the solution they deliver to you. If they upgrade their system, you'll be forced to upgrade in most of the cases, without having time to prepare or even refuse the upgrade. If for whatever reason you are dependent on a feature from the previous version that they decide to phase out (because it's "beta") then you are out of luck. The same applies if the cloud provider raises his prices. You'll have to comply or stop using the system. 

Generally, in the Cloud world you might get interesting prices, but you have very little control on the way things evolve and you are fully locked-in to your provider, even more so than with proprietary software.

Now Open-Source exists in the cloud, and it's called Open-Cloud. We believe that if you are going to choose a Cloud provider, you're better off choosing one that does Cloud AND Open Source. It's similar to shopping in an online shop that also has an offline presence and will allow you to have the same experience, both online and offline. It's even more important for software, since you cannot switch providers all the time. When you choose a provider you're stuck with that choice for a while.

With an Open-Cloud provider you can start on the cloud, then if you need to make more customizations or are constrained by the cloud setup (there are always constrains, so that costs are shared across clients) you can decide to move to the Open Source Software offering. You'll be able to get back your data and deploy it on your own install. You'll still be able to have support and will also have access to services. Lock-in is minimal, as Open-Source solutions often are more open in terms of API and support of standards, which means you can migrate your data easier. You can also decide to keep the Open Source software and change service or hosting providers, as the software can be serviced or hosted by other companies. Open Source promotes competition.

Today things might look nice in the Cloud because providers are in customer acquisition mode (they are trying to get as many customers in as possible). But we all know what happens once the market consolidates and you get less actors that get close to monopolistic power, especially when the customers are fully locked-in as we explained earlier. Prices will go up, options will go down. When this happens it will be too late for those who chose the wrong providers.

With Open-Cloud offerings you get an open future with much less risk of being locked in.

This is why at XWiki SAS we believe that Open-Cloud is the future of Cloud offerings and that Open Source is even more relevant in the cloud world than in the non cloud world. Since the sales and marketing costs are still kept down versus cloud sales costs, we believe it's a good business for the software provider as well.

Ludovic Dubost
XWiki Founder and XWiki SAS CEO

• XWiki - Vision of Open Source: see other articles.

Here is a small infographic that groups several numbers (from different sources like CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld...) about Cloud Computing.

After running the features survey for almost two months, the moment has come to get a closer look at the results. By reading this blog post you'll finally discover what features our respondents are looking forward to having in XWiki's 4.X release cycle!

Let's have a look at our respondents profiles:

• XWiki administrators represent the majority of our respondents
• The repartition between the Community members and the XWiki customers is well distributed

Chart: What kind of XWiki user are you?	Chart: Who are the respondents?

We'd like to thank everyone who answered the survey!

Themes rating

No surprise here when comparing these results to the first results overview we presented in early March.

"Ease of Use" and "Quality" remain the top themes of the survey. They are closely followed by "Wiki management" and "User development tools".

In the meantime, "Help", "Applications and AppStore" and especially "Social" are less of a priority as they don't reach the level of 3 out of 5.

Chart : Themes rating

Features rating

The trends we noticed in early March are still relevant. "Multipage export", "Better PDF export", "Page load time", "Search improvements" and "Organizing pages by drag and dropping" are among the most requested features. During the 4.X release cycle, we will be focusing on them.

Chart : Features rating (score on a rating scale of 5)

Some of you left us some comments and ideas about features we did not mentioned in the survey and how to improve some existing features. We appreciate your comments and we will be taking them into account during the roadmap meeting.

Some of you also congratulated us on the job done. We want to thank you and we promise we'll keep up the good work!

During the 2nd-7th of April 2012, the XWiki Iasi team will be actively participating to the national career event JobShop, organised by BEST Iași. You'll be able to find our stand inside the Faculty of Industrial Chemistry and Environment Protection and also to meet our team in several contexts and activities:

1. Successful Careers: Marius Florea (R&D Engineer) will openly speak about his professional path, along with other IT professionals. He will also present a range of opportunities that graduates can have on the labour market, based on XWiki employees example, and will answer to different questions regarding the steps to follow towards a successful career in the IT field. 

2. Presentation booth: The XWiki Iași team will directly interact with students and graduates of technical faculties, while presenting several aspects of the XWiki life. They will also speak about the professional development opportunities within our company. Right now XWiki is looking to expand her team by a few new hires: 2 Front-End Web Developers and 1 QA Engineer, bring your CV and come meet us!

3. BACo (BEST Academics & Companies): Eduard Moraru (R&D Engineer) and Ecaterina Moraru (Usability & Design Engineer) will meet both with students and representatives from "Gheorghe Asachi" University, in order to debate on methods of improving the educational process. This year the theme of the debate is "How can companies get involved in students' development".

4. Technical Training - “Development process, the XWiki way”: The XWiki Team members will present the major development tools that are needed to create, maintain, test and develop our Java based project XWiki Enterprise:

• Maven , our primary build tool, 
• Git , our source code management tool, 
• JIRA , our issue management and bug tracking system, 
• Jenkins , for the continuous integration system,
• Eclipse , as our integrated development environment.

You will have an excellent opportunity to learn how all these tools are combined and integrated in our development history.

To attend this event, please complete the registration form.

All the XWiki Team will be happy to welcome you at our JobShop activities !