Development of Foswiki and TWiki - get the facts

It is often claimed that only a few developers moved from TWiki to Foswiki, therefore the first article will look at who are/were active core developers of both projects.

Number of core developers

The analysis focus on core development of both projects, as this is a major indicator for the health of a software project. This is because you need a lot more knowledge and background for developing the core product than for writing an extension with a clearly defined API.

Claim

"We have healthy downloads, an active user community, and a very active support community. However, we are a smaller developer community than we used to be."
Source: Blog post by Peter Thoeny (Twiki.net) - 11 Nov 2009

Fact

Developers of TWiki and Foswiki
Core contributers
PeterThoeny
SopanShewale
CrawfordCurrie		CrawfordCurrie
KoenMartens		KoenMartens
MichaelDaum		MichaelDaum
RafaelAlvarez		RafaelAlvarez
AndreUlrich		AndreUlrich
TravisBarker		TravisBarker
ArthurClemens		ArthurClemens
GilmarSantosJr		GilmarSantosJr
LynnwoodBrown		LynnwoodBrown
OliverKrueger		OliverKrueger
ColasNahaboo		ColasNahaboo
KennethLavrsen		KennethLavrsen
MarkusUeberall		MarkusUeberall
SvenDowideit		SvenDowideit
AntonioTerceiro		AntonioTerceiro
WillNorris		WillNorris
MartinCleaver		MartinCleaver
New to core development
SebastianKlus		SebastianKlus
OlivierRaginel		OlivierRaginel
EugenMayer		EugenMayer
LarsEik		LarsEik
IsaacLin		IsaacLin
GeorgeClark		GeorgeClark
AndrewJones		AndrewJones
New developers
		SeanMcCarthy
		RobManson
		BenBeijer
		RaulFRodriguez
		MarkSchumann
		MichaelTempest
		AndrewPantyukhin
		DrakeDiedrich
		PaulHarvey
2 Core Contributers		32 Core Contributers

Statement

Developer community:

Look at the list of developers contributed to the core of both projects since the commercial takeover of Twiki.net. The TWiki.org development community has dropped to almost nothing - only Peter and his employee Sopan is left. Whereby all other TWiki.org core developers moved to Foswiki.org. Together with new developers, Foswiki has almost doubled its core contributors!

Healthy Downloads:

Yes, lots of users still download the old TWiki code as they don´t know about Foswiki and its progress. Our marketing was very bad as we are better in concentrating on improvements than in talk about it. Sadly even most of our old TWiki user community don´t know about Foswiki and may wonder why there is no progress on TWiki.org.

Sources

As the analysis is based on open source, you can easily check the correctness of the data by yourself. For the first analyzation I used the following sources:

• TWiki.org SVN trunk/core
• Foswiki.org SVN trunk/core

Don't miss the rest of the series:

• Introduction