[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Erik Moeller]

2010/11/15 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> *However*, that is orthogonal to whether a privileged private closed
> source partnership is an acceptable arrangement to keep around. And
> the consensus appears to be that this is a question that needs some
> serious thought.

Well, I don't agree with your characterization as a "closed source
partnership" -- it's a partnership that has resulted in development of
key open source technologies. If you want to take the PDF generated
using the open source toolset based on ReportLab and send it to a
printer (or hack it to make it prettier or more suitably formatted),
you can do that today. What you're not getting as open source is a
LaTeX renderer that generates books using the same typesetting and
print tweaks that PediaPress provides.

What I do agree requires serious thought is whether we should or
shouldn't acquire or develop an open source LaTeX renderer. One
argument in favor of doing so is that it will make it easier for other
commercial services to do what PediaPress is doing, creating a more
competitive marketplace for the provision of actual printed books.

To me, this is not the strongest argument -- given the scale of the
current print-on-demand operation, we're unlikely to see significant
commercial interest unless/until we decide to significantly expand the
visibility and scope of the feature. That's not to say it wouldn't be
a good thing to have (more quality open source code always is), but
I'm skeptical that it would have dramatic impact.

There are other arguments for developing such a renderer. For one
thing, it will make it much easier for people like Robert to then take
the generated LaTeX, manually improve it, and create books with a
"personal touch" that's missing from the PDF pipeline. It would also
be useful to many of the open source textbooks projects out there.
(BTW, people interested in this space should check out
http://www.booki.cc/ , which is a great new open source
authoring/print platform.) I'd be curious to hear other arguments in
favor of such a development project.

An engineer contacted me off-list offering to write a LaTeX renderer
plugging into mwlib (the open source parser library). Once we have an
initial estimate of cost and complexity, we can make a considered
decision whether that's an effort worth supporting.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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