Hello everybody,
We’ve published a summary of the brainstorming we had during the XWiki Seminar 2018 about what XWiki features we should add, improve, remove or make paying.
What do you think about what was listed so far? Do you agree and support the top features listed?
If you want to contribute and share your opinion about this topic just comment on this topic.
Hello Evalica,
Interesting analysis; however, I am disheartened from a user perspective to see the category of “Make Paying” features. One of the reasons we as a company selected XWiki was that we have the benefits of open source software partnered with commercial support agreements. We’re happy to pay support agreement pricing (which is already on-par with Confluence licensing- so don’t increase pricing too much!); however, XWiki would no longer make economical sense if we have to pay for support AND extension licensing. Right now we are able to make due without paid extensions, but simply adding 1-2 paid extensions will tip the scale and start costing more than Confluence.
Hi Nicholas,
there must be a misunderstanding about XWiki SAS’ offers. Currently ALL paying extensions are included in all XWiki Support contract from “silver” level. When compared with Confluence, XWiki Support at bronze level (without extension support) is at least half price compared to confluence support (and even less than half for high number of users), and XWiki support at silver level (with extensions) is at a similar price as Confluence and just a few Confluence extensions will again double the price of Confluence. Also XWiki Support is a much “closer” support than what is gotten with Confluence support. To get some high level enterprise support, the additional pricing for Confluence are 10-50k just for that on top of the licence.
Our goal with paying extensions are not to change our pricing conditions in any way towards our support customers which are our partners and helping us finance the XWiki software development team. Our goal is to try to get some more partners that will help us. There is a difficulty to make companies that sell their own products (with their own proprietary rights) that the open source world will only work if there are companies paying to get people working on the products they use. Currently many companies are taking open source for granted without fully understanding how the model works.
I’d like to point out that in this process, all our paying extensions still have all their source code as open source under the same licence. We just don’t provide them as free easy to install packages. It is still possible to have other parties packaging them for themselves or others.
By proposing paying extensions and keeping our core product fully open source and free we believe we have the right balance which on one side allows to bring up the financing aspect with prospects and customers and not make them believe it can work with everything being free, pay our developers, and on the other side continue to build open source software which at XWiki is our main goal.
In any case, as a support customer, do talk to our support team about the paying extensions. You have access to all of them. Our support has started a campaign to directly inform customers.
Ludovic
Hi Nicholas,
XWiki started to think about paying extensions when we tough about new ways to finance the project. We have many contributed extensions in the Extension Repository, but because we are a small team that takes care of them, it’s important to make a selection of what we should prioritize when providing support. XWiki SAS is handling the paying extensions and there is a dedicated team for this purpose.
XWiki Standard acts like a platform and the common denominator for all the Flavors, but extensions (and paying extensions in particular) usually cover a particular use case that may not be interesting for the majority of our users.
The brainstorming’s purpose was to discuss what current features from XWiki became deprecated, not interesting anymore for the majority of our users or are missing. We discussed also what extensions do we think would be good candidates for paying apps.
Regarding your comment about Confluence, the main differentiator is that our platform and extensions are open source, and what you are paying is for support.
Hello Ludovic, Evalica,
Thank you for the responses - yes I misunderstood and was not aware that paid extensions are included with support contracts silver and above.
I do see many of the proposed “To make paying” as being applicable to enterprise environments. Specifically for us:
XWiki Platform needs to accommodate multiple flavors and use cases, like simple wiki, groupware, public website, documentation, development, farm, etc.
The extensions you’ve mentioned are indeed interesting for enterprise environments, but not for all the use cases mentioned above. Anyway, the listing’s titles are a bit ambiguous and may lead to interpretations (in the brainstorming things seemed more clear 
), but they refer mostly to advanced stuff. For example XWiki Platform has and will continue to provide administrative tools, rights, export, etc.
Hi,
Just wanted to add that when Caty said « XWiki started to think… », she meant XWiki SAS and not the open source project, I.e. XWiki.org. On the open source side there are only free extensions being supported and available on extensions.xwiki.org. Any user or company can host their own extensions repository and decide to provide free or paying extensions open source or not. This is what XWiki SAS is doing on store.xwiki.com (and as mentioned XWiki SAS has decided that all its paying extensions are also open source), So this is in no way related to XWiki.org. The XWiki open source community takes pride in clearly separating governance of XWiki,org from businesses.
Thanks!
I think the confusion may come from the fact that when Caty opened this thread she forgot to mention that she was posting it and speaking as a XWiki SAS employee so when she said “we” and « XWiki seminar » in the first post, she meant XWiki SAS and XWiki SAS seminar. We need to be more careful in the future and try to avoid « we » as much as possible or explain whom we are referring to when we use that.
A nice additional feature might be a Personal Notes or Highlights capability, like the features a Kindle provides.
I am not a developer, but this feels like it could be based on the Annotate functionality. Same UI, tick box for personal note, user specified colour for the highlight.
Imagine the tricky bit is keeping the note attached to the text as the article changes, i.e. make it slightly tolerant to variations in the text. Not sure how this is done for Annotations.
If this sounds like a good idea I’ll create a Jira entry for it.
Note that this probably means creating a dedicated page for storing personal annotations for a given page (for scalability reasons). Ideally we should have the user profile page be a non terminal page and be able to have nested pages under it, with some “PersonalNotes” space under it, in which to store the personal annotations for each page. And we could probably move some other things there such as notification data.
I think it’s a good idea. I don’t think it’s a huge need since you’re the first one to ask for it and I don’t think I would see this as being included in XWiki Standard by default but I’d see this as an Extension that someone could install on his wiki. This would make a nice extension on xwiki-contrib.
Note that in order to reuse the annotations UI/mechanism, the annotation code would need to be refactored to be extensible/reused. Maybe a UI Extension Point would need to be added too.
So this is not some small work 
Feel free to record it in JIRA as an “Idea”.
Thx