The Enterprise 2.0 Summit, an event for which XWiki SAS is a sponsor, will take place in Paris on Tuesday and Wednesday. This is an excellent opportunity to hear prestigious experts and practitioners such as Luiz Suarez, Bertrand Duperrin, Dion Hinchcliffe and Richard Collin talk about Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business.

If you are not yet convinced about the benefits of participating in this event, I invite you to read this article.

Ludovic Dubost will participate in two sessions:

• On February 7, from 14:40 to 15:30 he will be talking about Social Business Deployment with Frederic Charles (Lyonnaises des Eaux)
• On February 8, from 14:00 to 15:00 he'll try to propose a roadmap for the market in a plenary session entitled Future of Social Business Technology Roadmap with other players in the field (Seemy, blogSpirit, Yoolink …).

• To read more about the event
• To register

Mitra Sramana has a very interesting post on ReadWriteWeb. 

What is explained in this article correspond very much to the reasons why XWiki choose to stay independent and I can only agree that the twitto-blogospheres focuses way too much on funding of startups that has not necessarly proven anything about the viability of the funded company. 

It would be great that there is more focus on successful companies that did not require any funding. These companies have a much higher change to continue to bring value to their customers than funded companies that will necessarly require an exit and will have to go through many risks once they are merged into a bigger company.

Articles like Mitra's are great to raise peoples understanding.

XWiki is in the process of finalizing the 3.x cycle (stay tuned for the 3.5 XWiki Enterprise release). Since the 4.x development cycle is quickly approaching, we have decided to launch a survey in order to find out which features you'd like to see included in XWiki Enterprise. All opinions will be taken into consideration in the next release cycle.

We have selected about 60 features which, we think, could be interesting to develop and have divided them by sections (development tools, ease of use, wiki management etc.). Of course, this list is not exhaustive, so please feel free to send us your ideas as well.

We would really appreciate it if you took ten minutes to fill in the questionnaire available at http://bit.ly/xvjosn.

Thanks for your time.

In an article on Business Insider I found out that Damien Katz, the founder of CouchDB, decided to move away from the Apache project and to the Couchbase project, leaded from the VC backed company Couchbase.

What he is doing is what I described in my previous blog articles:

• Choosing a business model and stick to it until further notice
• Building to last: Why XWiki SAS will remain an independent company

First Damien Katz should be recognized and respected for his incredible Open Source contribution with the work he did with CouchDB.

Now one can understand that he might want to control more the future of his product and/or that he wants/needs to earn money out of his innovation and the success of it and/or that he wants to build up this innovation as fast as possible.

But in his article there are a few things that are not acceptable from my point of view:

1/ Not respecting his own project CouchDB and your own contributors by using the title that he used. The title basically say that whatever he does will be better and dismisses what the Open Source Community could make out of the code he contributed to. He might be right in the end if his model works out better, but it's a plain lack of respect

2/ He is not mentioning the Couchbase is built out of the Couchbase startup and that it's company funded by investors. He is indeed not mentionning that currently the couchbase code is Open Source (although it is now at the end of his post after Chris Anderson has mentionned it). Obvisouly many people understood that the move was about money. He might put some doubts in the head of people by stating that "everything" couchbase is open source at this moment. Now can he tell us that he can guarantee that in the FUTURE, "everything" couchbase does will be open source ? I'm pretty sure he won't, mostly because I'm pretty sure his investors would not agree with that and that it won't be the case in the future.

He should be honest about the real reasons of the move. It's because he is in a business oriented company, and wants to control the direction of the technology that is build, and he plans with his investors to make significant profits out of this work and that in the future his creations might not be open sourced.

It is very sad, that it seems that many Open Source companies are using the business model of gathering a community with the open source code, and then progressively close whatever they do in order to make more money out of it. I specifically mention "more money" out of it, because I personally believe that in most cases you can make money out of a respectfull open source strategy, but there are a few constrains there and probably one of them is to not need outside investors. This is what we try to do at XWiki SAS where we have a manifesto which explains the way we plan to behave and where we have commited ourselves to stick to our model.

Ludovic Dubost
Creator of XWiki Open Source Software and Open Source company XWiki SAS

Whenever you talk about a company, you often begin by discussing its "business model", rapidly dismissing the product itself. This is particularly true when the product is initially free, when you find the idea a little weak or the market is already crowded. The question the founder is faced with is "how do you plan to make money ?".

For XWiki, there was the obvious precedent of existing Open Source companies which seemed to make things simpler, but that wasn't enough. When I created XWiki, there were quite a lot of choices to pick from:

• consumer oriented wikis on the cloud
• a software as a service offering
• making the solution proprietary
• an open source business model based on services
• an open source business model with dual licences
• an open source business model a la "redhat"
• an open core business model
• any combination of the above

Initially I released XWiki under the GPL licence, but I quickly realized I would have many difficulties with this model, as it would make receiving contributions and allowing more embedding of XWiki too complex. Also given wiki pages could contain code, too much complexity would have been created around the licence issue. I dropped the consumer play very early. Although there were no public Wiki farms at the time, I found that the XWiki product was not meant for consumer Wikis and that the advertisement model would require a lot of page views and therefore a big platform. I moved towards an Enterprise target which matched what the product did better. I also moved to LGPL and a business model based on services, which seemed to me a nice balance between protecting our rights and setting our obligation towards our users and contributors. Basically users and contributors can do what they want, including adding proprietary code, but if they want to redistribute the modified software, then they need to redistribute the modification performed to XWiki itself as LGPL (this doesn't apply to their own modules as long as they don't contain LGPL code).

I had long discussions with many people about Dual Licenses, about the Open Core and we continue having these discussions (more on open source licenses in another post). In my view the most important thing is to stick to your licence and to your business model to avoid confusions. You'll have people that like your license, while others will not. You can't please everyone, so the best you can do is to avoid pissing everybody off. 

An example has been the case of extjs which moved from "close to LGPL" to "GPL Dual Licencing", which created a lot of confusion around extjs with many people feeling "robbed" of their time and investment in the community. While the developer has the freedom to choose his model and to find a way that works for his business model, it is plain wrong to experiment with this. If you really need to do it because you have no other business model, you should at least apologize for letting people down (longer story here)

As for the Software as a Service model I did not fully drop it as we did hosting very early, but I realized we would have to wait before implementing SAAS. While the model is very interesting on a longer term, the price point per client is very low (advertisement or low initial fees). Unfortunately as you start a business the cost of a client is pretty high, while on a longer term your cost per client drops very quickly. This makes the consumer and software as a service business model quite capital intensive in the beginning, while the enterprise business model with services is much less demanding from this point of view.

This is where your objectives become important. If your are looking to build a startup, want to have a quick growth and are ready or very interested to sell out quickly, then choose the business models that pleases the VCs and go for VC backing as soon as possible. You will need to be aware that you'll most probably lose your freedom as an entrepreneur and become stuck in the "way things work" for startups.

On the other hand, if like XWiki, you want to remain in control of your future, then you have to pass on VCs and capital intensity. The good news is that it's possible. Service oriented business models or even cloud (to a lesser extend, if your product picks up fast) can be low capital intensive.

Many companies tend to start with the low capital intensive business model and then move progressively to the more intensive one, once they have sufficient traction and they can get capital from VCs. Sometimes this was their plan to begin with, while other times they are pressured by the investors. This is one of the things I was never ready to propose to investors when presenting XWiki. This part is quite disappointing if you view it from the "community side". Any company builds a community around the promise its future holds. When your business model changes you risk betraying your community. You have to be very careful from the ethics point of view, as well as the business point of view.

This problem is not new in the tech industry. Customers need to be more and more careful of the lock-in issue and more informed about the provider's motivation, as well as the sustainability of its business model. More on that in another post.

For XWiki SAS we chose the Open Source business model based on services, complemented with an Open-Cloud Software as a Service offering, and we plan to stick to it.

Ludovic Dubost
XWiki Founder and XWiki SAS CEO

Here at XWiki we are carrying out several research activities to keep up with the evolution of current technologies and to explore new and interesting ways for improving our products. In order to do so we collaborate with other enterprises in collaborative research projects: the main goal of these projects is to push forward the state of the art and to capitalize the efforts by building top-notch products incorporating these advancements.

Currently XWiki is involved in four research projects.

The first one is Wiki3.0. This project aims at developing a next generation collaboration platform that integrates real-time editing and interactions, social-networking features, and that will take advantage of cloud infrastructures. The 3.0 generation, as it is envisioned by the partners of the project, is characterized by the following elements: conceiving and taking advantage of realtime functionalities on the Web, integrating social-networking and advanced collaboration capabilities, enriching the content using semantic annotations, and scaling-up the platform by adopting and integrating a cloud infrastructure.

The key aspects here are the real-time editing and social functionalities integrated in a comprehensive platform for managing structured data and developing collaborative applications. We have already started to reap some of the outcomes: the latest release of XWiki Enterprise Manager includes Workspaces which are the realization of the research carried out about social interactions and functionalities.

We are also actively working on the real-time editing using the source and the wysiwyg editor. We are targeting the first quarter of the next year for releasing a functional version that can be installed on top of XWiki.

The second research project is CompatibleONE. This project aims at providing interoperable middleware for the description and federation of heterogeneous clouds comprising resources provisioned by different cloud providers. The main goal is to be interoperable with most platforms in order to provide maximum freedom to users and developers and consequently breaking vendor lock-in. XWiki is participating actively by leading a use case effort and by providing the implementation of some technologies.

The key aspects in this project are the experimentation with cloud technologies at the infrastructure and platform level. We did a lot of experimentation with technologies like OpenStack or OpenNebula for managing infrastructures. We also developed some utilities for managing the configuration of the underlying infrastructure and its monitoring. These activities will allow us to acquire knowledge about virtualization and infrastructure management in order to improve our current XWiki software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

At the platform level we are investigating the usage of NoSQL data storages like Cassandra for storing and querying XWiki structured and non-structured data. These will allow us to understand how to make XWiki scale using this kind of technologies and will provide useful insights about how to make XWiki query languages evolve in order to be as much independent as possible from the underlying data storage.

The third research project is STREAMS. This project is more pure-research oriented and aims at designing peer-to-peer solutions that offer underlying services required by real-time social web applications and eliminate the disadvantages of centralized architectures. These solutions are meant to replace a central authority-based collaboration with a distributed collaboration that offers support for decentralization of services. This project can be considered an evolution of a previous project in which we took part: XWiki Concerto, which is also available as an experimental extension.

STREAMS takes a completely opposite approach with respect to mainstream cloud computing architectures. We think that it is still interesting to continue investigate these approaches based on peer-to-peer computing because they provide useful insights about how to organize and synchronize collaboration among independent peers and how to scale our architectures without having to rely on a central cloud provider.

The last project is Resilience which is about data replication and safety in web application. In this context we are experimenting on integrating rich content editors in our products which will allow user to edit and manipulate non-textual objects. We will also take advantage of the underlying platform which will guarantee the safe replication of data and its availability, including offline storage.

To sum up, XWiki is actively chasing the future by participating in projects that allow us to understand and experiment with the technologies that have good chances to become mainstream tomorrow. We try to be up-to-date with the constant evolution of the state of the art by anticipating the future and by actively seeking new projects that are interesting for our long-term roadmap.

If you are interested in participating to these challenges you might want to have a look at our open positions page

Jacob Morgan (co-founder and Principal at Chess Media Group) uploaded the slides from his keynote on the state of enterprise 2.0 collaboration at Online Information 2011.

via

During Online Information 2011, David Burns (Digital marketing manager at IWA Publishing) and Ludovic Dobost (XWiki SAS CEO) made a presentation about the encyclopedia Water Wiki, based on XWiki:

For more information, please see the two dedicated case studies, available in our References website section.