SocialText is an enterprise-focused wiki provider. Until this week, it has been offering either a hosted service or a 'behind the firewall' server appliance. Both fee-based. Now, it has added an open source distribution to the SocialText repertoire. This is currently in beta but can be downloaded (around 3MB) from SourceForge.

Implementation will only appeal to propellor-heads. It's not like slapping in a pc application. Socialtext Open is written in the Perl interpreted language and, providing you have the Perl modules and an appropriate platform, away you go. I'm not going to pretend to know the technicalities but it looks to me as if Apache and Linux are good things to have in place too. The documentation is pretty terse and tucked inside the download.

The important thing is that those who want to experiment with an in-house wiki, but don't want to hand over the readies to Socialtext, can do so. Socialtext itself has left out its enterprise management and enterprise integration tools from the open source, so that if you get hooked, you may want/need to spend the extra later on.

This is only the beginning of the Open Source development for SocialText. The Public Roadmap explains other moves in the near future which include the ability to use the popular MySQL database management system.

Just in case anyone is misled by Socialtext's headline: "Socialtext First Commercial Open Source Wiki", Ludovic Dubost, the founder of XWiki is making no secret of his outrage. See the first comment on Joi Ito's post if you prefer to read it in English.