When reading Janne's post last Saturday, I didn't know how to react on it: whether to laugh or to cry. I still don't know. Well, crying over a piece of software is a bit silly considering the unfair distribution of happiness and wealth in this world, but still I didn't interpret his post as just a simple feature comparison between JSPWiki and Daisy.
At first, I was thinking how the mainstream IT press would report on this:
- JSPWiki leader throws towel in ring
- Wiki wars: Daisy declares victory
- Professional Open Source aims for the Big Win
... and more mindless editorial headlinery to capture eyeballs and sell advertising.
What I read however was the rupture of two worlds, separated at their heart and soul.
Obviously technically JSPWiki and Daisy are two totally different beasts, if only because the former is a Wiki and the latter is a hybrid Wiki/CMS. JSPWiki is about managing a set of text files and breaths Wiki all the way down, whereas Daisy's Wiki-dness is more UI-oriented and it doubles as a full-blown content manager, albeith with some twists. And we do HTML WYSIWYG editing, though Janne has been looking into that as well. Daisy's default front-end webapp is Cocoon-based, whereas JSPWiki is - well - JSP-based. But even there the amount of difference depends on how you look at it - what level of similarity or dissimilarity you want to check. Both are Java-based, for instance. Both are open sourced. Daisy under the Apache license, JSPWiki under the LGPL: there's a fundamental difference in "license beliefs". JSPWiki's easy installation, compared with the slightly more elaborated architecture of Daisy, and the installation burdens coming naturally with that.
In my opinion however, there's a different type of rupture to be explored.
The world of the lonely hacker-for-love-and-passion vs. the one of business-supported open source development. I suppose Janne works on JSPWiki in the evening hours, stealing an hour here and there from an already busy schedule. Daisy is a 9-to-5 coding effort, or rather 10-to-6. Looking at the SVN history, that has accumulated into 16 solid manmonths of continued design and development - 8 hours a day. So it's kinda normal that Daisy has more features than JSPWiki.
Another thought about his post however was more along the lines of "Gee, it would be cool if we would be able to attract more Janne-like contributors to Daisy".
Daisy and JSPWiki are just two totally different beasts, with a different mindset, a different audience and a different business model. Yes, we've seen people moving up from JSPWiki to Daisy. But when we think competitive about Daisy, we never compare it with JSPWiki. Confluence, and JotSpot, and OpenCMS and Lenya. Magnolia as well, and XWiki. Those are projects we're happily competing with. JSPWiki however and the relentness energy put into it by its developers, has served as an inspirational example. Without JSPWiki, Daisy would never have happened.
So Janne, don't feel frustrated: you're one of the giant's shoulders we're standing on. Thank you for that!
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Actually, the reason why JSPWiki is still LGPL is not really anymore so much about philosophy; it's just that there is so much code sent by others already that it might be a bit difficult to move it to Apache now.
I've been thinking about doing Apache license on and off, but so far I haven't really bothered.
JSPWiki is SIMPLE to install. It doesn't take much with JSPWiki to setup an intranet site for document repository and wiki page sharing for a development team. And the first look at Daisy already puts me off for installation *wink*