[pmwiki-users] Conceptual challenges from ZAPwiki...

Sivakatirswami katir at hindu.org
Sat Jun 2 18:50:09 CDT 2007


The Editor wrote:
> On 6/1/07, Ben Wilson <dausha at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 5/31/07, The Editor <editor at fast.st> wrote:
>>> Just wanted to post a follow up regarding the initial beta
>>> release of ZAPwiki.
>> Dan, et al. I'm generally a charitable fellow who likes everybody
>> to get along. ZAPWiki is the exception to my rule. First, Dan is
>> clearly adverting an alternative solution---a rival product.
> 
Dear Dan:

Let's climb a mountain, sit quietly
  and scan the global information landscape below.

PMwiki is all about collaboration.

Set the code aside for a minute and look at the value system of what PM
is doing and the way he goes at it and the high, positive level of
cooperation among both naive users, naive admins and those who have PHP
competency and working together...

It is "beautiful to behold."

Politicians and multi-nationals and many religions (not Hinduism) set
up boundaries and square off markets etc. walls are built and lines
drawn.

  Pmwiki is all about going a completely different direction. I
know it sounds like I'm overly romanticizing and idealistic, but really,
when you brought ZAP into the mix, we had faith you were on board that
vision. Some of us believed in you... That's what it's all about... it's
not just about PHP this or that. Maybe it's taking the metaphor way too
far, but in a world at war projects like PMwiki and others like it,
IMHO make a huge difference on the
"inner" landscape of the mind of human consciousness.

You may have good intentions, which  boil down to "aspirations
for optimization" which is not a bad goal. But you are missing something
more important here on another level: To pull up stakes, and set
up another "nation" you "broke the faith."

Some of us are really, really naive admins.. I don't know a drop of PHP
and we are at the mercy of the recipe writers... and as such are quite
vulnerable.  We invest in PMwiki absolutely *because* it is based on
collaboration, and an open source model that we believe everyone is
loyal to. That's the whole point. It's the foundation for getting on
board the ship in the first place. And we are talking serious business
here:  mission critical enterprise documentation.
Because we believe, barring comets
crashing into the earth, it will still be alive and well 5-10 years from
now, exactly because everyone stays on board and works together.

(For the very same reason, we use PostGreSQL and not MySQL on our back
end of our web server as the latter is not *really* open source...)




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