I just had a meeting with my boss and the VP of Engineering, about the fate of Diamond Wiki, after my recent disagreements at work. The short of it is that I get to keep the wiki publically available, and I get to continue adding features to it, but I have to take down the link to the source code indefinitely. I may be able to give the source code to people who ask for it, but I'll have to get permission first, on a case-by-case basis.
Because Diamond Wiki is currently based on PikiPiki, which is GPL, I'll be rewriting Diamond Wiki from scratch to remove the GPL dependencies. This makes me sad, since I strongly believe in open source. I know that I'm not legally obligated to do this, since I'm not technically "distributing" the Diamond Wiki, however it would be violating the spirit of the GPL.
I plan to rewrite it in haskell, just for kicks. I was unable to find any existing haskell wiki implementations, and so I will be filling a void (even if a very small, irrelevant void). I also noticed that the obvious name for such a project, hiki, is already taken by a wiki implementation in Ruby. So feel free to suggest a name.
I intend to release the haskell wiki implementation under the GPL. But the facted navigation features will remain private, until and unless I get permission to distribute them.
Posted on October 8, 2003 02:41 PM
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Oh, Kim. I'm so sorry. More, I'm disappointed in endeca. It's just so unpleasant to see corporate bodies using weight simply because they can, rather than because it makes sense.
How very disappointing. I wish they were better than all that. At least in academia you see the majority of people and groups trying to be ethical and, critically, good to other people. It seems that doesn't happen at the sort of company endeca is. Don't let them convince you that everywhere is like that.
Posted by: Vinson at October 8, 2003 06:12 PMThat is a shame.
Thanks for doing the right thing, even beyond the letter of the licence.
Posted by: Martin at October 8, 2003 06:28 PMWhy? Is faceted navigation patented or something? Or do they fear that your product will compete with what they're doing? I don't understand how they can do such a thing.
Okay, yes I can, if you signed some draconian employment agreement, or they threatened you, but still, I don't like this.
Sigh.
Posted by: Sean Conner at October 8, 2003 09:09 PMKim,
Have you considered calling your haskell-based wiki "haski" or "haki"?
Sean, the concern is that by offering software that does faceted navigation, and doing so as an Endeca employee, it's unavoidable that the software will reflect upon Endeca. They wouldn't have a problem if someone unaffiliated with Endeca were to create the same software.
As for the employment agreement, it doesn't cover this (I made sure to read it carefully before signinig it, and I asked for several changes first). But jobs are about 20% legal, and 80% social. It's the social part that's putting pressure on me.
Posted by: kim at October 9, 2003 11:38 AMade, I like "haki". It reminds me of hacky, which reminds me of apache, which was originally "a patchy webserver".
I was also thinking of "hockey", since the goal is for it to become a haskell-blog-wiki. But "hockey" would be difficult to use in a google search.
On another train of thought, if you combine "functional" and "blog", you get "flog". This would make a great verb, as in "I just flogged Bush's Marriage Protection Week".
It could have been worse:
http://www.michaelhanscom.com/eclecticism/2003/10/of_blogging_and.html
Posted by: kim at October 29, 2003 02:21 PMWiski :)
Posted by: at November 16, 2003 12:36 AMname:
haiku?
haven't done any research.
haven't looked for python wikis lately. diamond does exactly what i was going to have to mod a pywiki to do.
thanks for doing it for me.
Posted by: rusty at February 10, 2004 05:36 PMwhiki
Posted by: dave at April 23, 2004 03:58 PM