Great, SocialText announces it's return to Open Source Roots.
I'm not sure exactly what this is going to mean. Maybe we'll see a community oriented development model and real access to the source of what SocialText is doing in it's own offering.
This is definitively what SocialText should have done right away and never left. This is what we are doing with XWiki, with all our development in the open (on our SVN repository on ObjectWeb).
Now I'm not sure this is going to be enough for SocialText. I'm not sure the platform on which the SocialText solution is build is the right solution which will allow to scale to the feature set that people could use on top of Wikis. When it comes to collaborative real-time editing, or building blogs, adding social features or building applications on top of the wiki (like solutions like Jot or XWiki are doing) a more object oriented platform is way more powerfull.
The back-end platform used by a vendor is not something for which end-users can see the issues right away. Users are usually more impacted by the front-end issues. The back-end issues have a huge impact on the speed of development, on the ability to shift strategy and get to new markets, on the ability to integrate outside solution and on scalability and platform costs (for ASP solutions).
Now SocialText has a great brand, great funding, so they can improve their solution. We'll see if they can do that.
