Hi everyone! I am Stefana, Product Manager of XWiki’s Pro Apps. I am writing in order to get your opinion on injecting a Pro Apps project in XWiki’s Weblate instance.
Short context:
Pro Applications are a set of extensions developed and supported by a dedicated team within XWiki SAS. Like everything at XWiki, Pro Apps are fully open source, under LGPL-2.1 license and you can follow everything that we do, including our roadmap, on github. Our work focuses on applications such as Active Directory Authenticator, Diagram, Confluence Migrator and many others. We wish to inject a project in l10n for better visibility and to not duplicate configurations.
The potential conflict:
By default, Pro Apps are packaged under a license with a free trial which, when purchased, offer the buyer technical support services for said application. When installing the applications from your XWiki instance’s Extension Manager, you will receive the licensed application. If you wish to benefit from support services from XWiki SAS for the application that interests you, you can purchase the “license” which is not a license to use the product, but a maintenance service. If you do not wish to use XWiki SAS’ support and you only wish to use the app, you can request a free license (same features and updates but no technical support) or you can build the app on your own from our github.
The need:
We would like to implement a method of contributing to translations for these extensions, but we understand that our model is not typical and that the commercial implications may not make them appropriate for open source contributions. Of course, if we do inject the Pro Apps project in l10n, we will make sure that the contributor is properly informed and notified that they are contributing to a separate project, with a different model.
Therefore, I would like to get your opinion on this:
Would it be in order to inject the Pro Apps project in l10n?
-1 from me. The main reason is that l10n is for XS and contrib projects and the pro apps you mentioned are not contrib projects. See https://contrib.xwiki.org/
Specifically:
They’re not developed collaboratively
They’re not followong the dev rules from xwiki.org
They’re not using the contrib issue tracker (jira.xwiki.org)
Etc (in short they’re not part of the xwiki.org ecosystem)
I’d recommend to set up a weblate instance for XWiki SAS projects. We can help you do that as we have some expertise of doing so.
XWiki SAS is the main contributor for the XWiki Open Source project
Some of the money that are used to develop XWiki Standard features come from paid Pro Apps licenses
Translating voluntarily Pro Apps on l10n could be a way to support the development of the XWiki Open Source project
Same as we have rules for promoting paid support on xwiki.org (also hosted by XWiki SAS) we can imagine agreeing on some rules for adding paid (open source) apps to l10n, and let the users decide if they want to translate them or not (again, voluntarily). We could also decide to try this for a limited time and see if we receive any translations for the Pro Apps. I know this mix between com and org can be seen as controversial or fishy, but I don’t think we should dismiss the idea too quickly.
+0 on my side, but we need to define some rules.
Thanks,
Marius
Disclosure: I’m an XWiki SAS employee, working part-time on Pro Apps
Where is the consistency, why l10n? Why not agreeing to add paid apps to jira.xwiki.org, or xwiki-contrib on github, or extensions.xwiki.org, or …?
I make a difference between allowing some advertising of sponsoring companies in some places (as a recognition of their support), but keeping separate the organizations, and allowing sponsoring companies to use the xwiki.org services for their own needs. IMO if we do this, there’s no limit. I’m still very -1.
If we zoom out, I see only 2 options that are logical and consistent:
Either xwiki.org is separated from xwiki.com, with its own governance. This is what we have now.
Either xwiki.org and xwiki.com merge, because XWiki SAS is sponsoring a huge part of the development of XWiki, and we drop the separation and trying to be an open and neutral ground for XWiki development.
I think I’m also -1: I do see the pros in having a unique translation platform for all XWiki (.org and .com) stuff, but IMO if we mix it in same platform it will bring even more confusion and it’s already not so easy to people to make the distinction between the open source project and the sponsoring company.
As Vincent mentioned, we could easily set up a weblate instance for XWiki SAS projects, and I think we can even probably import some glossaries from there if we want to have some consistency in the translations. Now for having translators in this new platform: to be discussed, but maybe we could put a banner in XWiki.org Weblate to kindly ask translators if they’re willing to also perform translations in XWiki.com Weblate platform with a link. To be investigated we may even have a unique auth system for both platforms (not entirely sure about that one).
Sure, but I was more wondering if people with an account created on l10n.xwiki.org, not relying on an external auth manager, could use that account to be authenticated in another Weblate instance, and I don’t think that’s true.
Please tell me how to get this free license, what needs to be done for this?
And another question: is the free license available for all PRO applications or only for some?
Hi @hrapitan please write to contact@xwiki.com and specify the apps on which you would like to have a free license, along with your instance ID, and we will generate them right away. You can have free license for all Pro Apps.