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Content Tagged with User:alex + opensource

I’m happy to announce that SourceLabs has decided to release SWiK-Source – the code that drives swik.net, under an open source license (GPL v2).

Although we didn’t want to make any promises, open sourcing the code to the wiki has been something we intended to do from the start of the project. Personally, in designing SWiK as an Ajax powered wiki, I don’t think there’s any reason it can’t be used for various purposes beyond driving swik.net, and in fact for the past 6 months internally at SourceLabs we’ve repurposed SWiK-Source to run as our internal wiki to help organize our internal projects. People write weekly status reports in the blog pages, describe design policies in wiki pages, and use tags to avoid a disorganized wiki.

It’s been the single biggest demand by far since we started the project, that we go beyond licensing the wiki pages under an open license, but that the entire engine driving the site be open as well. Designing and building a web service however isn’t exactly the same as building a software product: we didn’t design for environments that aren’t our own production servers.

That will not change, with the release of SWiK Source – it’s still designed to be run on production servers. We’ve abstracted to a configuration file everything that might be specific to a wiki install, such as the desired wiki name and the paths to libraries, but the code is still written for a server environment. While the code is open, setting it up and installing it is not for the faint of heart, and we haven’t tested it in settings too far beyond the servers we run.

The documentation for the project will live entirely on SWiK and be collaborative. If you want to help with the SWiK-Source distribution, that’s what we need: better docs on using SWiK-Source in different settings and for different purposes, or fixing any problems with the current docs. The installer script could use some love too.

All that being said, I’m excited to finally be able to offer SWiK-Source as free software, and at the very least feel free to poke around and see how it all works.