Hey all.
I'll reply to some of the more finer legal details tomorrow but to be clear
the repo will be made available publicly and the code base will be open
sourced and based on open source tech.
Seddon
On Thu, 9 Jul 2020, 19:06 Benjamin Ikuta, <benjaminikuta(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I agree, the lack of transparency is quite concerning, as is the use of
AWS.
I sure hope we're not going to be producing closed source code!
On Jul 9, 2020, at 10:19 AM, Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Joseph for the links. It's more clear
now.
I think I need to clarify something: I'm not against asking the big corps
to pay. If they are using a significant amount of our computational
resources (=donors money) to make even more money, they should pay. And
thank you for improving the movement's financial security. I don't oppose
the general idea.
That being said, what worries me are the details:
* WMF is creating a company (LLC) and contracts that company, this means
less transparency. This is the first time I think in the history of the
foundation AFAIK that WMF is creating a company for legal reasons (I'm
sorry if I missed anything).
* That company is contracting another company for engineering work (even
less transparency). We have lots of engineering resources at WMF.
* As the result, for the first time, code produced by donors money is
closed source and inaccessible to public (or at least I couldn't find the
code linked anywhere)
* I find it ethically wrong to use AWS, even if you can't host it in WMF
for legal reasons, why not another cloud provider.
* There wasn't a period for giving feedback for example about the choice
of
cloud provider or anything, suddenly it came out
ready. The rumors about
it
have been going around for months.
* This has not been communicated properly to the community, I find this
lack of communication and transparency concerning and insulting.
Hope what I'm saying here makes sense.
On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 7:02 PM Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I tend to agree with this. I'm one of the first to criticize WMF when
they
> deserve it (I wish they didn't as
often!), but I see nothing wrong with
> consumers of huge amounts of data being asked to chip in to cover the
costs
> of providing it. That is, of course, provided
that there is never any
fee
> for use of the API for users of data in
regular amounts, but every plan
> I've seen thus far accommodates that.
>
> Todd
>
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 7:15 AM Ad Huikeshoven <ad(a)huikeshoven.org>
wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Great news: the WMF is going to charge the tech giants for using the
API
>> millions of times each day. Nothing in
the free licenses we use
obligate
> us
>> (that is we in our movement) to provide an API for free as in beer. It
is
>> part of KAAS: Knowledge As A Service,
part of the strategic direction
>> chosen in 2017.
>>
>> Thanks for your understanding,
>>
>> Ad Huikeshoven
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 8:33 PM Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup(a)gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>> Today I stumbled upon this public phabricator ticket [1] created by
>> someone
>>> from WMF starting with:
>>> "My team is creating bi-weekly HTML Dumps for all of the wikis, except
>> for
>>> wikidata as part of the paid API project."
>>>
>>> I have so many questions:
>>> - What is the "paid API" project? Are we planning to make money out
of
>> our
>>> API? Now are we selling our dumps?
>>> - If so, why is this not communicated before? Why are we kept in the
>> dark?
>>> - Does the board know and approve it?
>>> - How is this going to align with our core values like openness and
>>> transparency?
>>> - The ticket implicitly says these are going to be stored on AWS ("S3
>>> bucket"). Is this thought through? Specially the ethical problems of
>>> feeding Jeff Bezos' empire? (If you have seen this episode of Hasan
>>> Minhaj's on ethical issues of using AWS [2]). Why can't we do/host
this
>> on
>>> Wikimedia infrastructure? Has this been evaluated?
>>> - Why is the community not consulted about this?
>>>
>>> Maybe I missed announcements, consultations or anything, forgive me
for
>> my
>>> ignorance. Any pointers is enough. I also understand diversifying our
>>> revenue is a good tool for rainy days but a consultation with the
>> community
>>> wouldn't be too bad.
>>>
>>> [1]:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T254275
>>> [2]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5maXvZ5fyQY
>>>
>>> Best
>>> --
>>> Amir (he/him)
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>
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