The company is turning to open-source development to spur uptake of its hosted and licensed Wiki (What I Know Is) software, which helps people better collaborate over the Web.
Open source is the Wiki way, read a statement issued by the Palo Alto, California-based company. The company will now share development code with the open-source community at large.
The company’s first contribution is a new Wiki desktop editing tool called Wikiwyg, which is a play on the term WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get). The tool was first released late this summer and is based on Ajax, a development technology for creating interactive web applications.
Wikiwgy represents Socialtext’s first serious attempt to share code at the presentation layer of its Wiki framework. But it is just the start of bigger things to come, according to officials.
Around 20% of our code has been open source. We aim to increase that to 80% by the first quarter of [2006], enabling enterprises to zero-cost pilot a Wiki solution without licensing fees, said Ross Mayfield, co-founder and CEO of Socialtext.
Socialtext is also backing the SynchroEdit open-source project, which is developing a real-time editor for the Web.
Socialtext recently closed its second round of venture funding worth $4m (including a sizeable investment from SAP Ventures), bringing its total funding to date to more than $7m.
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About 200 enterprises, including Nokia, Symantec and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, use Socialtext’s Wiki system to drive their internal collaborative networks.
