Saq: So when did TiddlyWiki go from just another experiment on your desktop to you realizing you had something special on your hands?
Jeremy: Gosh, that’s interesting. Well, in a way, I knew it was special from the beginning, because the reaction from lots of people that I trusted and respected was amazingly positive. And although people go gaga on the internet for stuff all the time, I was really flattered that the things that they identified as being cool about TiddlyWiki were the things that I thought were cool as well. Um.. sorry, what was the original question, just to make sure I don’t drift too far?
Saq: The original question was just, when did you realise you had something different ..?
Jeremy: <interrupts> ..so literally the 20th of September, 2004. The experience of putting TiddlyWiki on the net to say ‘this very first version was scarcely practical’. But I think I put it up on the Monday, and then had like 23 hits the following day, which was my mum and my sister kinda thing, and then the day after that we had a couple hundred hits because I’d gone and spoken about it at a conference here in London, and then on the Friday it was picked up by kotke.org, Jason Kotke’s fairly well-read blog, and it just exploded. The nature of the feedback gave me lots of comfort that it was a cool and interesting thing, but just didn’t give me much comfort that I’d discovered.. <laughs> what I was really looking for, which was to start a conventional business that could make money.
Saq: So TiddlyWiki’s an open-source project, which means that the source code has been available to everyone and on top of that you used a BSD license, which in layman’s terms means, well, anyone can do whatever they want with it. What was the reasoning behind that decision?
Jeremy: Well, before TiddlyWiki, I didn’t have any particular experience or even opinions about open-source. I mean, neutral to positive opinions about open-source. And like many people, when I came up with TiddlyWiki, I was explicitly thinking about commercial applications, and so my instinct was to try and find way to keep my options open by closing some of it off. There’s no question that I would have put it out under a closed source license were it not for the fact that TiddlyWiki is exposed source anyway, and the fact that it’s entirely on the client means that anybody can do a ‘ViewSource’ and read the entire code. So that meant that I could’ve tried to protect it and could’ve tried to keep it proprietary, but the cat’s already out of the bag. So at first I published it under Creative Commons license, which was probably an inconsistent thing to do, but I just thought that that’s what the internet kids do, so I’ll do that. Then I got a certain amount of feedback from people, saying I should use a proper software license. But the thing that became clear was that having accidentally started an open-source project, the most important thing with open-source is adoption. An open-source project isn’t really alive unless it’s got adoption. And so I found that by making it a BSD license, that minimizes the chances that people who first approach TiddlyWiki are going to get switched off by the licensing terms. For instance, people who approach TiddlyWiki may figure that is has grey applications in education, which is a common reaction of people, and for some people, in exploring those applications, they quite understandably don’t want to write off the idea of commercially exploiting those ideas up-front, but certain open-source licenses would require you to, up-front, before you even start using TiddlyWiki, agree to the restricted license about non-commercial applications.
So in fact, while nobody’s made a big, mainstream commercial play with TiddlyWiki, it has been integrated into four or five completely commercial propriety products, and probably more that I don’t even know about.
Saq: One of the interesting things about TiddlyWiki is that there’s a populism prosperous community that’s sprung up around it. Perhaps you’d like to tell us a bit about when that started happening, and perhaps what led to it.
Jeremy: Well again, because I knew nothing about open-source when I started, I didn’t realise the importance of a community, and I didn’t realise what a community brings to open-source projects. So to begin with, I just published my email address as part of TiddlyWiki, so for about six months, the ‘community’ was me dealing with an increasing number of emails from people wanting to talk about TiddlyWiki. And that’s cool; I was really loving the fact that what people were saying was generally very positive and I got a lot of people interested in it.
So then in about June 2005, maybe a little before that, I just couldn’t cope with emails anymore. So I opened up two Google groups, pretty much so that I wouldn’t feel this volume of pressure to answer all these emails. And what then happened was that both of those groups grew to .. I don’t know how many hundreds of members there are now, but a pretty substantial community. And the thing that it left me free with, really, was that for a long time the coding of TiddlyWiki was a solo project, and I think that to do all the other things that needed to be done, like support and so on, was really tricky when I was doing all the coding myself. But very quickly it became clear to me that the community was a way of sort of sharing some of that work. I got a glimmer, really early on, of how the community could sort of help itself in a way. The benefit to me is that I share the work, and the benefit to the community is that they could get much better support from each other than they could from one man.