At Friday 31 May 2013 01:24:38 DaB. wrote:
On 05/30/2013 05:31 PM, DaB. wrote:
that WMF has already won
The WMF has not "won" anything, because there was never a contest or battle, nor was there an adversarial position to begin with.
sorry, but that’s untrue. The hole thing started as WMF announced to WMDE that WMF will stop to provide database-replication and database-dumps in the future. For this reason the CEO of WMDE claimed that further investments in the Toolserver would be a waste of money (he also assure the general member meeting with that). If that is not "adversarial" I have no idea what is.
My concern
- and that of the Foundation - align exactly with yours: provide a good
and stable environment for community developers to do their work with the least possible fuss.
The Toolserver is not just a place where you can put a program and run it or host a website. It’s a living community creating stuff in a anarchic way that works only in praxis but not in theory; it’s like Wikipedia. WikiLabs is more like Nupedia – in theory it is better, but in praxis it is empty and cold. The difference is that for Nupedia Jimbo accepted that it can not work and stopped it, and forced not Wikipedia user to switch to the _better_ platform. In our case it is just the way around: After the WMF noticed that nobody needed WikiLabs that started to look for a problem for their solution, and found the Toolserver.
You sincerely believe that the Toolserver was and is the best solution towards that objective. I disagree, and think that the Foundation has more resources to set up and upkeep that environment and to insure its future. Either way, it's the developer community that "wins", regardless of where the actual environment ends up being.
This does not, in any way, diminish the value of what you have done, or of the effort you have expended in doing it. The Toolserver served its purpose very well for a number of years! We have simply reached a point where the continued maintenance of such a critical service living outside the infrastructure remains rational.
That we are in a position to support the developer community with more resources
So the WMF have more money, how great…. WMDE would have enough money to support the Toolserver and there are other chapters too that offered money. It is not a matter of "resources" it is a matter of control, because the WMF controls the database-access. Make your bosses release the threat, offer ToolLabs as an alternative of the Toolserver and see what’s happening – that would be a fair fight, and we all know that competition improves a product.
-- Marc
Sincerely, DaB.