On 16 September 2010 17:49, Robin Schwab contact@robinschwab.ch wrote:
Those are very weak arguments: social impact... cultural connections... We live in a world of competition between open source and proprietary software. This competition has blossomed into products like Firefox or Windows 7. When we /a priori/ exclude one or the other we will miss the chance of using the really best software. I'm disappointed to see Wikimedia being trapped in it's own philosophy. Given this situation the only alternative we have is to actively let somebody program the requested feature or to wait until somebody does it spontaneously. Both ways it may take years to have a satisfactory result.
Wikimedia tends to choose "unambiguously free" over "expedient" every time, so it's not clear why an exception would be made in this case.
There are exceptions. I believe we used Java before it was entirely free software, and our image server was Solaris 10 for a while though I believe that's changing. If you really think you can put a case as to why this should go through, you could argue it on wikitech-l. I don't like your chances, but it's possible.
- d.