Q&A's on Foswiki?

What is Foswiki?

Foswiki is a Wiki and an Application Framework, supporting a new direction for creating collaborative, user-centric environments, and groupware applications supporting information sharing, report generation, and workflow tools (to name but a few). The products of the project are totally free, and are licensed according to free software principles.

Foswiki has many enterprise users, including top companies such as Yahoo!, Google, and Motorola. It is used mainly on corporate intranets, fostering enterprise collaboration by enabling requirements such as knowledge management, project control and document management, but is also seen on the open internet, supporting public sites.

Foswiki can be extended by selecting from over 280 extensions (freely available online), allowing it to be tailored to various requirements. Written in the popular Perl language, it is very open to extension and user-specific customisation.

The current release is Foswiki 1.1.9, built 2013-11-18. Please see the Foswiki release notes for more information.

How is it different?

Foswiki is unique in so many ways, it's easier to say what it isn't.
Unlike Mediawiki, Foswiki is a structured wiki aimed primarily at the enterprise, designed to be extended by its users.
Unlike most other structured wiki offerings, it is not a commercial product masquerading as an open-source project, but is a totally free, community-developed, people-driven initiative.
Unlike many other open-source projects, it has a lively community, and impressive longevity (some of the codebase is over 10 years old now).

Who is involved?

The project was been initiated in 2008 by developers and users of the 'TWiki' project, when a commercial interest attempted a takeover of the project community. All of the key active developers moved to Foswiki, and many new contributors have come on board since then. Most regular contributors use Foswiki in their workplaces, and thus have a vested interest in improving it.

The project is run on open, democratic lines by an elected foundation which represents the contributors, and is independent of any commercial interests.

Foswiki is actively supported and developed by a vibrant, multi-national, and multi-lingual, community. Its live chat support channel is always friendly and extremely helpful. Foswiki is also supported on a commercial basis by WikiConsultants all around the world.

Development activity is lively, with over 10,000 check-ins in Subversion in the 2 years since inception, and more developers joining the project regularly. See http://www.ohloh.net/p/Foswiki/contributors for a list of contributors.

What is your target market?

We are interested in anyone who is excited by the potential of groupware and collaborative tools in the workplace and beyond, with a focus on enterprises and web site creators who want to let their users create applications and information systems on their own, without requiring specialized technical assistance. A wiki-based tool, Foswiki can support various Web 2.0 applications, including social networking tools and mashups.

We offer scalable solutions to all Wiki users, including those on the public Internet as well as users on corporate intranets.

What license do you use?

We are strong supporters of the GPL (GNU Public License), and free software in general. The concept of free software is what has made this new project possible. This means that virtually all code, documentation and artwork is licensed as GPL.

-- Contributors: CrawfordCurrie, LynnwoodBrown, SvenDowideit, EugenMayer, MartinSeibert, RafaelAlvarez, ArthurClemens, MichaelDaum