XWiki : Vision Open Source

XWiki

Tech companies, the buyout

When you participate in the creation of a tech company, particularly on the product side, there are plenty of reasons why your work might get lost. The company might fail, the product might not work and the company may survive with other products, a particular part of the product might be dropped. These are actually pretty good reasons why your work might go down the drain.

Now the good thing with open source is that it can never go fully and completely down the drain. Even if your company is closed down, the code is still released as Open Source and available. You can decide to reuse it.

This is not the case with non open source code and there is an even worst reason for your code to go down the drain: when it disappears after the buyout of your company.

XWiki

Choosing a business model and sticking to it until further notice

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
Cloud Computing

Chasing the future at XWiki

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.

XWiki

Building to last: The Objectives

I've already established in my previous post that: "I wanted to build a technology company that lasts, a place where we would improve things step by step, an environment where we would enjoy ourselves, while building products that are useful to our customers and to the world." I also mentioned that I consider success and Open-Source mostly means as opposed to standalone goals.

Let me go a bit more into the details of these objectives and why they are very important to me and XWiki SAS.

Firstly the key goal is to enjoy ourselves while building products. This company was started by working on a product that we strongly believed in. In addition to being a great information organization tool, XWiki provides an intuitive way to build Web Applications. XWiki is for web development what Wikis are for content management. Hence the 'X' in XWiki refers to 'extensibility'. XWiki is already an advanced enterprise solution given all its built-in features, but can also be extended using its APIs. Our passion for building the best extensible enterprise product is one of the ingredients that keeps us going.

XWiki

Building to last: Why XWiki SAS will remain an independent company

In November 2003, I had just left Nielsen-NetRatings and I started coding XWiki in the sunny south of France, in Valbonne, a beautiful place I highly recommend you to see. 

It has been 8 years now, and looking back, I don't think I fully realized what I was doing when I decided to create something on my own. I actually was just experimenting my product ideas, but soon enough I became interested in starting a company. The company was initially called XPertNet , now XWiki SAS. At the time, I didn't know exactly what type of company this was going to be.