On 8 September 2010 22:15, Jamie Morken <jmorken(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
I was involved in an open source project that was
usurped by one of the main developers for the sole reason of making money, and that
project continues now to take advantage of the community to increase the profit of that
developer. I never would have thought such a thing was possible until I saw that happen.
If that developer wasn't acting greedy, there would now be open source hardware for
radio transceivers of all types, but instead there is only open source software for radio
of all types. I find it a shame, and when I was working on that project I could *feel* it
being usurped! I unfortunately may be paranoid as I feel the same thing here with the
wikimedia foundation usurping wikipedia. If you don't believe me, just consider that
it is a very gradual process, like getting people used to not being able to download image
dumps anymore, and ignoring ALL requests to restore this functionality. Also failing to
provide full history backups of the flagship wiki. These two facts allow the wikimedia
foundation to maintain the control of intellectual property that wasn't created by the
people.
This is something that's been a problem for years now.
I do not think there is any sort of deliberate intent. However,
keeping the data close is a way to proprietise a wiki even if it's
free content, so making it easy to fork is an important attitude to
maintain.
I realise this is difficult when the devs have to work as hard as
possible just to keep everything from falling over ...
- d.