On 1/18/08, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I'm disappointed to see that the Wikimedia foundation has yet again missed an effort to use its viability, both internally to the community and externally, to promote pre-existing community driven
As has been pointed out many times, there is no exclusivity here. Just last December, Sue & I allocated a substantial piece of our Wikiversity presentation time at Stanford to let Michael Dale talk about MetaVid; we're hosting it in our SVN repository, and I've also offered that we would endorse grant proposals or be happy to support the project in other reasonable ways. It's not mature enough for real world deployment on WMF sites; nor is Kaltura.
I'm not going to argue with you about the technical merits of either approach. There's no point in doing so: I am happy to let the open source ecosystem compete for the most viable solution. Your arguments regarding volunteer time are questionable at best; people will either choose not to participate for the reasons you've given or others, or if they do, then we can assume that they have made up their own mind. We're quite transparent about what Kaltura is and what it isn't.
Putting out a press release and inviting users to participate in an external beta test in order to incentivize open source and open standards within previously proprietary technology is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and I'll be happy for us to do it again if and when the opportunity arises again. It's in line with our mission and our values: free culture is an open movement that reaches out to others, rather than excluding them, in an effort to transform society.
The Wikimedia Foundation is not an isolationist organization. We don't want to be an island -- we want to be the ocean.