Saq: So the acquisition of Osmosoft by BT, what does that mean for TiddlyWiki?
Jeremy: Well, hopefully, it secures TiddlyWiki’s future. I mean, in a way, TiddlyWiki’s future has always been secure. One of the marvelous things about it is that if you create a TiddlyWiki now, you can be reasonably confident it will still work in 30 years time. I’m assuming we can get a Windows Vista emulator for whatever funky computer we’re using in the future. And obviously, that’s not true with Flickr. It would probably be rash to assume your photos will be safe on Flickr for 20 years. So in a sense, TiddlyWiki always had some independence and stability. But BT means that Jeremy is more secure. I’m not being chased by the tax man. There were times when TiddlyWiki was going on when I was being chased quite hard. <laughs>
Saq: And how does it change the community’s role?
Jeremy: Well I hope not at all. What I’d really like, is to get to the point where there are other entities the size of BT interested in it, so we can see BT as just one of the people happy to publicly contribute to TiddlyWiki because of the benefit that they get from it. One of the characteristics of BT, as I said earlier on, is that it’s an immense company with lots of resources, and some of those resources, we’re going to be trying to put at the disposal of the community. An example of that would be eye-tracking hardware is commonly used in mainstream web development business as an input to the user experience or UI. But those are expensive pieces of kit, and therefore it would be a rare open-source project that had a decent level of access to them. It’s not something we’re set up to do right now, but I hope to be able to do this, and gain access to those machines, and share it with open-source projects, very freely, just as long as they share what they’ve learned from it. So for instance, if we had 20 popular open-source projects that suddenly had the benefit of being able to use one of these devices, and shared that so that other open-source projects could see not only the benefit of using the hardware, but that these guys are Osmosoft who might be able to help provide it. So we want to do a certain amount of stuff like that, in areas where BT is reasonably well set up, we’ll hardly notice the pain of providing resources but making a difference in the community that would be hard to do without that extra resource.
Saq: Right, well, you have a bit of a different perspective on TiddlyWiki, having created it, having been there from the beginning, so what do you envision for the future of TiddlyWiki?
Jeremy: That’s an interesting question. In a funny way, I think that TiddlyWiki’s future is really TiddlyWiki as a platform. So that means that the TiddlyWiki code itself, I hope, is going to continue to slow up, to become a more and more stable platform. In the very early days of TiddlyWiki, all the innovation was in the core. So, y’know, ‘woo, we’ve added tagging!’ and ‘woo, we’ve added this new innovation!’ and now already it’s abundantly clear that the innovation is at the edges of TiddlyWiki, in the plugins. And so the ecosystem around TiddlyWiki, we need to get exactly the right balance, and it’s an ongoing process to get it right, where we keep the core up to date and keep it fresh, but keep it stable enough so that it feels like you’re on an island and not on a raft if you’re working with TiddlyWiki.
That’s a great metaphor for it. <laughs>
Saq: It really is! Um, so TiddlyWiki. It seems to have a life of it’s own now. It’s kind of self-sustaining. What does it feel like to have to relinquish control, to an extent, over something that you’ve created?
Jeremy: Oh, absolutely glorious, because I’m relinquishing control over it to people who, y’know, my admiration for all the people in the community who’ve helped means that .. well, it’s the difference between standing in a bus shelter on your own and being at a party with people you like. I’m often struck by the fact that people like you, who’ve made really decisive, long-term contributions to TiddlyWiki, and sacrificed lots of time – and I can see from the times of day that people reply, that you and other people are spending a lot of time on TiddlyWiki – and it’s always a bit, well, at least I get the benefit of ‘Jeremy Ruston created TiddlyWiki’, so I get really obvious kickback in terms of respect or something. And it’s really striking that the people in the community don’t have that. I mean, within the community, for sure, we do. But when I see people giving so much, so selflessly, it actually means that there’s very little I can claim ownership of anymore. I’m proud to have originated the thing, but the reason we’re sat here now, and what makes TiddlyWiki so special today is completely out of the zone of the clever things I did right at the beginning.