BlueSpice MediaWiki
BlueSpice MediaWiki (BlueSpice for short) is free wiki software based on the MediaWiki engine and licensed with the GNU General Public License. It is especially developed for businesses as an enterprise wiki distribution for MediaWiki and used in over 150 countries. History. The German company Hallo Welt! has been developing the open source wiki software BlueSpice since 2007. The project was originally initiated as "bluepedia" by IBM, who wanted to deploy MediaWiki but were unable to live with its downsides. In 2011, Hallo Welt! decided to publish their wiki as free and open-source software. The stable version  of BlueSpice for MediaWiki was released July 4, 2011. From this point on, a free download has been available at SourceForge. The first release of BlueSpice was a couple of extensions and is today a complete stand-alone distribution, which has the latest MediaWiki as a core system but offers in the free version more than 50 distinct extensions and a completely different user interface. Following independent sources the BlueSpice free distribution is one of the most popular wiki software for knowledge management in organisations. In Autumn 2013, Hallo Welt! released the completely reworked version BlueSpice 2. According to the  BlueSpice developers this release aims for opening up BlueSpice for freelance developers in the global MediaWiki community and multiple language versions. In 2014, BlueSpice for MediaWiki became a project of Translatewiki.net. In January 2015 the developers announced that they will change to a subscription model. Functionality. Some central features of BlueSpice are: Technology. BlueSpice is written in the PHP programming language and uses MySQL, Apache/IIS, Tomcat (optional). The editions can be installed on top of an existing MediaWiki installation or as a standalone installation that includes MediaWiki. The distribution is a collection of extensions, which can be extended with  user-specific features or skins. While every single extension can be deactivated, BlueSpice editions integrate and standardize extensions to improve the user experience and maintenance. Licensing. According to the MediaWiki standard all extensions are published under the GPLv3 license.