I think that given the interests of the team members, we have a good chance of improving support for non-WMF users.
Brion and I spent countless hours as volunteers in the early days, working to make MediaWiki into a viable installable product. Brion wrote the first web installer, and I wrote most of the current one. We answered questions on #mediawiki from all comers, responded to bug reports, and did tarball releases. So we're both invested in seeing this thing work.
Kunal Mehta is working for us part time. He is also involved in the MW Stakeholders Group, and administers non-WMF wikis.
On 04/04/17 04:35, Brion Vibber wrote:
We'll be primarily working on things for Wikimedia -- that's what people donate to WMF to support [...]
Yes, revenue is a big part of why it is a tough sell with WMF management. And in the past when I have spoken about raising revenue from MW users, there were concerns about mission creep.
We can certainly work on things that benefit both WMF and non-WMF users of MediaWiki. It may even be possible for us to prioritize such tasks.
On the other hand, we will be refactoring, and there will be deprecations. So extension developers, especially out-of-tree extension developers, might have some extra work to do to keep up with core.
-- Tim Starling