If business folks would only learn: Trying to hostilely take over a F/LOSS project fires back.

Too poor, history apparently is repeating itself. As what happened to other community-backed Free Software projects before, now seems to happen for TWiki as well. Back in April 2008 I had a look on a series of F/LOSS projects that got money-backed and then forked — Mambo/Joomla, Asterisk/Callweaver, Trixbox/PBX in a Flash.

And now TWiki.org/TWiki.net. Michael Daum’s post, linked above, describes the TWiki situation as that Peter Thoeny, founder of TWiki.net, root admin of the TWiki development system and owner of the TWiki trademark is doing everything to achieve a hostile takeover of the TWiki project. The signs are obvious: “complete lock down of the community site [...], all long-time contributors have lost access to their code. [...] Access to the site [restricted to] contributors [who] agree to a set of newly installed terms and conditions dictated by” TWiki.net.

I agree with Michael Daum that once you put money into the equation of a community-driven, things change. Michael’s point is that people will stop to work for free. However, I see the point that business folks often tend to try to restrict such a project, despite it’s Free Software. Thoeny’s approach is to try to force the core developers into a terms and conditions agreement of his own. That might even work.

For example, if I remember correctly, the Free Software Foundation is one legal entity that can go after GPL license breaches. Precondition to this is that the FSF actually has the copyrights for the software it “legally represents”. And precondition to that is that developers transmit their rights on their code to the FSF.

So, if TWiki.net could force TWiki’s contributors to sign over their rights on their code contributions to TWiki.net, that actually would make TWiki.net to the sole representer of TWiki. It’d be left to the lawyers whether that’d imply to own the TWiki code then, despite it’s under a free software license right now.

However, obviously, the TWiki community does not play by Thoeny’s rules right now: Michael reports: “the community has left the building, leaving TWIKI.NET without a contributing community.” They fork a newly founded project NexTWiki from TWiki. — As contributors usually also use that nice piece of software they’re contributing to, I wonder whether it may be a rule that developers will fork once any opposing party wants to restrict their code — well, actually make that restriction come into effect.

Maybe, some of my observations made for the three/six projects mentioned above apply here, too.