11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015

XWiki: Product & Community

Guillaume Delhumeauby

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Who I Am

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Guillaume Delhumeau

● XWiki.org “committer”

● XWiki SAS employee

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Agenda

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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?

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What XWiki is

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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...)

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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...

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A wiki

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With structured data

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With extensions

More than 300...

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Heavily customizable

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Heavily customizable

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Mantras

● The best way to organize information & collaborate

● Stop using emails!

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They trust us

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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)

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Community

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Governance

● XWiki.org is an Open Source project● LGPL license● Driven by its community

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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...

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«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)

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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.

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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

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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.

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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!

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Roadmap

● Each year, a «roadmap» is discussed by the committers

● Define the objectives for the comming year

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Sponsoring Company

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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

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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

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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XWiki SAS: What is XCS?

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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...)●

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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.

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Health

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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

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Questions?

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Thank you!

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Contact

Guillaume Delhumeau● Email: gdelhumeau@xwiki.com

● Website: gdelhumeau.myxwiki.org

● Twitter: @gdelhumeau