On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Merlissimo merl@toolserver.org wrote:
Because of the open source requirement i hope that i have rewritten my tools with the help of WMDE in about 6-10 month.
That's great, I'm happy to hear that WMDE is helping with this.
That's a boring and usless additional work
Boring it may be, useless it is not. Wikimedia is founded on free software / open source principles, for many good reasons, some of which have already been given in this thread. If the policy is motivating the elimination of a proprietary dependency for tools that are important and valuable to our projects, that means the policy is having its intended effect. In other words, your example underscores precisely why treating this kind of policy as non-negotiable is important, and why we will continue to do so.
Non-free licenses of various kinds ("use it for free", "use it for non-profit purposes", "you can inspect the code") may be tempting, but tend to cause problems in the long run -- due to changes of terms by the original developer, lack of compatibility with other licenses, lack of adaptability of the code, problems distributing the code in open source contexts, and so on and so forth.
On the upside, when open source projects eliminate proprietary dependencies, this is often the source of innovation and positive change that benefits more than just the project in question. The story of the Linux dependency on BitKeeper ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper ) is a good example of that.
Erik