Hey folks,
I usually steer clear of these sort of battles, but it looks like it's time to state the obvious: we need to work together better.
We're wiki people, damn it. We're the people[1] who figured out how to build an encyclopedia through (effectively) an anonymous system when those with less imagination were skeptical what it could even work at all. Now, we're fighting against ourselves about technology to support our wiki work and it is only wasting time, energy and social capitol.
DaB, I don't follow toolserver-l as well as I should. What can I do to help make sure that the Toolserver cluster is well supplied at least until labs meets 99.9% of tool developers needs. Do I need to lobby the WMF? WMDE?
Ryan, I'm sure it was not out of some sort of malicious intent, but a large number of toolserver users and especially DaB are getting a raw deal. At some point, someone seems to have suggested that WMF Labs ought to replace the Toolserver. This is painful because, while Labs is not yet ready for us, the Toolserver is already being phased out. It's not fair to just say, "Come on over to Labs and help us." I don't see how jumping ship before the next one shows up is a good idea. The majority of us are doing our work as volunteers. We can't just manifest extra maintainer hours in order to spend developer time on Labs. We're already spending more time dealing with Toolserver issues than we normally would.
Finally, the Toolserver isn't just a resource. It's our community. A community is far more valuable than technology. If we don't preserve our community, we'll all lose. So please, when we're fighting each other, our first thought should be how to not need to fight anymore.
So here we are. Today was wasted arguing about who was wronged. How do we work together better tomorrow?
-Aaron