11/17/15 OW2 con' 2015
XWiki: Product & Community
Guillaume Delhumeau
by

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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/C
ommittership

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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