I wish you best luck.
Grzegorz

It is a bit sad that you have to justify being generous and open by explaining that this is really the best way to make money — when, more likely— it simply the best way for you to fully release a new force in the world by promoting the combination of the Internet and collaborative writing.

Either way, I am cheered that you are who you are, Jack Button

And a related point: the forums are filled of bug reports, suggestions for new features, etc., and there's absolutely no answer to those posts (if you exclude the community itself trying to help out). There's no official bug database where to file issues, there's no official plan saying when a certain feature will be added (or if it will be added at all, and if not why). And so on. If wikidot becomes open source but this lack of communication doesn't cease, there are few chances it will be improved by community (and many chances it will simply be forked).

Sorry for the rant, but I'm satisfied with wikidot till now, and still I'm very concerned about the lack of attention to the existing users from the developers.

I can't wait for both!

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thanks for all your feedback! I am really glad you like Wikidot and that it proves useful to you!

As far as the open source release is concerned, we are aiming at next Thursday — the last day of January to keep the promise. It was not as easy as publishing the existing codebase, but I think the result will be nice!

@megasycophant: Wikidot is implemented in PHP. It uses some other open-source software. Currently we are setting up www.wikidot.org and dev.wikidot.org and we will try to put all the details there.

@ifavada: I doubt Wikidot can be installed in a shared-hosting environment. This is caused by requirements: Wikidot relies on the PostgreSQL database and a few PHP extensions that could be difficult to find at most providers. But hopefully we could make some workarounds for it in the future.

About the donations: I think there might be a way to support open source developers directly, but we need to think how to do this. We do not want to support Wikidot.com by donations, but it would be indeed nice to support the open-source development. But no details yet.

Thank you all. Working with Wikidot, although not easy, is a great experience and I hope that by opening the development and making it free we would enter the next major stage. And I am more than sure it will be exciting :-D

Michal

Wikidot gets a cut from people like me who develop wikis professionally, that is, for a living. Wikidot co gets 20%, I get 80% of ad revenue. Because I hate managing my own host, I prefer to develop here on wikidot. This allows the average user to use wikidot without ads if they want to. 20% would normally be steep, but — I'm paying for my share of hosting costs, continued development of software, and hopefully, a beer for Michal. :)

Amen. I was actually wondering if there was a place to donate, or if there's a way to help the site without using Adsense.

Honestly, I was looking for a free wiki on Google, and found Wikidot, expecting some kind of catch or severe limitation. Finding none, and seeing how amazingly awesome Wikidot is, I actually -want- to donate to this.

Granted, if you made me, I wouldn't want to. Wierd how that works out, isn't it?

Lastly, Wikidot.com's business model is not clear. This causes me a concern.

Wikidot gets a cut from people like me who develop wikis professionally, that is, for a living. Wikidot co gets 20%, I get 80% of ad revenue. Because I hate managing my own host, I prefer to develop here on wikidot. This allows the average user to use wikidot without ads if they want to. 20% would normally be steep, but — I'm paying for my share of hosting costs, continued development of software, and hopefully, a beer for Michal. :)

— hartnell

I can't wait for both!

Lastly, Wikidot.com's business model is not clear. This causes me a concern.

So here are a few details: as some of you know, our main effort now is concentrated on Wikidot 2.0 - the "next generation" wiki framework. It rocks, believe me ;-). But while everyone is waiting for the "2.0", we already have software that powers the current service at wikidot.com that would certainly be also very useful (even if not super admin/user-friendly) if released as open source now. So what we are going to do is:

Release current Wikidot v1 as open source

We are packing, checking and cleaning as much as we can to make the initial release now. At the beginning it would be probably more like a "hackers' release" but it will give you a chance to install, customize and run the software on your own server. For free of course. Cool, isn't it?

Open the development of Wikidot v2

With Wikidot 2.0 we are close to the point where we can invite other developers to join in creating (IMHO) the most advanced open-source wiki software on Earth. Several components are already done and can be instantly useful. The most important thing it that it is fully-modular with the nice system of extensions, modules, add-ons and plugins.

How?

For both projects we will be creating a publicly-available Subversion repository with the code. We will also redesign http://wikidot.org website to be a community hub for open-source products and development.

Both products will be initially available under the GNU Affero General Public License - version 3.

We deeply believe that free and open are the right ways to think about computer software and our releases will create numbers of opportunities for users, developers and administrators on their way to "wikifying the world"

On the day of the release there will be a few other nice announcements.

Good luck!

The Wikidot Team