What a stupid idea. The value of open source projects isn't in their code, but in their developers. The code, being GPL, can be picked up by anyone with few restrictions; on the other hand, the developers cannot be copied.
Its not even as if he could make a proprietary fork of the project; being GPL, such a thing is impossible unless you purge all code contributed by all other developers who refuse to go along with such a license.
Also given that there are competing, comparable, open source/commercial wiki projects (a mindtouch cofounder commented on the article), the developers do have other places to go...
Where's the benefit in this? I could understand it more if TWiki were a consumer-facing thing like Firefox with a huge codebase and a large developer community. Or did TWiki get big recently?
the blog post doesn't make it clear that Peter Thoeny started the open source project.
however, I also know well how the TWiki community works and wouldn't have expected that the original founder would act like this. TWiki in practice was owned by the community (much alike Debian)
Its not even as if he could make a proprietary fork of the project; being GPL, such a thing is impossible unless you purge all code contributed by all other developers who refuse to go along with such a license.