Google has been doing similar things for years with Google Summer of Code.
So did other organizations.
Free software is not necessarily non-commercial.
The whole point of Free Software is that everybody should be allowed to do
pretty much everything. It cannot and should not be prohibited. Free
software may, however, need to adapt to contributions from commercial
organizations. When Google tried a few years ago to pay people to fill
Wikipedias in languages of India with auto-translated articles, it was a
big failure, because the editors community rejected it. When PR companies
are filling Wikipedia articles in different with poorly sourced and biased
information about their clients, it is also frequently rejected and deleted.
A different issue is constructive editing for money or for prizes. Some
countries held article writing contests with prizes, and though there was
some opposition to them, they didn't hurt the projects in the long run,
especially if they already had established communities of volunteer editors
at the time of the contest. In any case, very few articles are usually
written in such contests. It's unlikely at this point that Wikipedia in any
language will be overwhelmed with many thousands of articles written for
money, although this may change in the future. Again, we cannot and should
not prohibit it, but we may want to think about how we shall adapt
ourselves to it.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2013/11/19 Mina Theofilatou <theoth(a)otenet.gr>
Hello all
I just wanted to share a link that I just found. It seems that Facebook is
running a campaign to encourage Computer Science students to earn academic
credits by contributing to opensource projects:
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/13/facebook-partners-with-22-universities-to…
#!
I don't think Facebook should be allowed to do this. Imagine Facebook
tried to pry its way into Wikimedia: I would expect all of us to revolt. A
for-profit organization taking advantage of non-profit ideals??? MAKING
PROFIT on non-profit? Would they even consider converting THEIR project
into an open-source one? Of course not. Don't Mozilla and other Open Source
Projects have ways of campaigning to attract CompSci students in their own
organisations? Why does Facebook have to be the middleman? I find it
revolting... if this is their idea of corporate social responsibility, I'll
have to find away to stop using Facebook altogether in reply.
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