Practical Differences Between Foswiki and TWiki?

Hi cothomps,

I upgraded all of my installations from TWiki -> Foswiki at their 1.0.0
release (which would essentially be TWiki 4.4) and have tracked them since.

The primary, chief, main, and ultimate difference between the two are "developers,
developers, developers." What what I can see, the set of demands forced by
TWiki.Net in their takeover ran off every single core developer except the
trademark holder, who is the CTO of TWiki.Net, and a contract employee. According
to http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/WebHome the number of core developers on Foswiki
is now 32, and the number on TWiki is 2. The departing developers include the last
two release managers and those who rearchitected the platform to OO design
over the last few years.

That makes it essentially a renaming, not a fork.

On technical differences, Foswiki is descended from the SVN "HEAD" and the
current TWiki from the previous "4.3" branch at the time of the split, presumably because manpower constraints at TWiki could not invest the effort to stabilize the
development branch. So Foswiki is significantly closer to deployment of pluggable database and pluggable server front and backends. Both projects fix bugs, but
Foswiki has had the huge manpower advantage and has a large lead in that area.
(They've also introduced bugs which they have subsequently fixed rapidly because
of the pace of development -- but then so has TWiki)

I've found the Foswiki community responsive on IRC, with a channel pretty
consistently inhabited by high-level developers. Access to both chat room
archival logs which will show the relative activity/inactivity can be found at:

http://colas.nahaboo.net/twikiirc/

The Ohloh project metrics reinforce this:
http://www.ohloh.net...project_1=TWiki

The last factor is behavior. I'm appalled by what TWiki.net did, and fully
understand the feeling of violation many developers have said they felt. I've
made blog comments to this effect before, and TWiki corporate has sent emails
complaining about my actions -- not to me, but to colleagues in my workplace.
In the first instance, to some twenty addresses obtained by mining one of my
wikis. Decorum prevents me from saying what I think should properly be said
about that.

TWiki goes to great lengths to extol the virtues of their "welcoming community" and
their "positive code of conduct." From my vantage, it would appear that they reserve
to themselves the right to exert the emperor's prerogative and everyone else can
go along or go elsewhere. So far, the latter choice has proven the vastly more popular.

I've been a user of both twiki and foswiki. I'm on the foswiki side of things. Rather than reproduce it all here, I would refer you to my blog article about it.
Cheers.
Fil