On 06/01/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
While we run the Subversion repository
You don't, it's on
leuksman.com, which is Brion's personal server.
svn.wikimedia.org resolves to leuksman through DNS.
My view is that we should make this the consistent,
official view and
consistently promote and list MediaWiki as a Wikimedia Foundation
project wherever other Wikimedia projects are listed. My hope is that,
in doing so, we will make MediaWiki more prominent and attract more
volunteers to work on it, just as on other Wikimedia Foundation
projects. I also believe that this will help in making MediaWiki
strategy a key part of the Foundation's general project strategy.
Legally, the Foundation has "MediaWiki" as a registered trademark.
What are other people's thoughts? The only
downside I can see is that
this might be seen as a move to exercise additional control over the
direction of development. But already, all major code changes to the
core have to be approved by Brion, who is a Foundation employee. I
actually think it will be easier to identify our responsibility
towards outside users if we consider MediaWiki to be a key part of the
free culture movement that the Wikimedia Foundation must support.
Well, of course it's going to be seen as a "move to exercise
additional control over the direction of development", because it is.
You wouldn't have wanted to consolidate MediaWiki as 100% under the
Wikimedia brand unless you were about to start ordering us to put
things in it.
Personally, I don't care; I'm not on the Foundation's payroll, and I
don't intend to start taking orders from users or Board members over
what I put in the code I voluntarily contribute to an open source
project. The only people I've ever directly deferred to are Brion, who
is our Benevolent Dictator, and Tim, who is an experienced and senior
developer.
Rob Church