On 06/06/07, Ashar Voultoiz hashar@altern.org wrote:
It is not about luck! MediaWiki is a wiki software written for Wikipedia, it happens to work for other website too. The main "customer" is still Wikipedia.
It's quite an interesting position now, because MediaWiki has evolved into a product in its own right, and while a lot of our bug reports and features do come from Wikimedia users, a good deal also come from third parties.
On a personal basis, I don't consider Wikimedia to be a "customer", and I don't consider them to control what I do on the development side, because I believe that the development team works much better when it can be considered an autonomous unit.
Maybe we can add a page somewhere that points to the WMF donation page though.
What, so Wikimedia can steal the funds that were directed at development? Aside from some specific projects and our two lead developers, Wikimedia do not contribute a lot of cash to the development team.
I would think it a much better idea if all the core developers established some sort of procedure for accepting donations. If a user likes something we do, e.g. Werdna's cascade-protection feature, or wants to encourage that developer to keep doing things, then they can reward that person directly.
I think we received "job offers" on the mediawiki-l list, some developers also received private offers to write extensions.
Such matters are a private offer, but since a lot of our developers are students or of student age, and no doubt find the extra cash useful, I think it's in our best interest to centralise and do all we can to streamline the process of getting these things sorted. It improves the reputation of the MediaWiki team, means more people use our software (so we get more prestige, more users, better feedback) and, I guess, means people have a good impression of MediaWiki overall.
If we can find appropriate software of some description to run on it, http://jobs.mediawiki.org or something (bounties? contracts? some other term? not quite sure I like the term "job" here, as it might not be salaried positions being offered (although I'm sure people could find jobs as MediaWiki development consultants)) sounds great to me, and something worth setting up.
Rob Church