On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 2:36 AM, DaB. <ts@dabpunkt.eu> wrote:
Hello,
Am 29.08.2013 02:24, schrieb Ryan Lane:

>
> Please read: http://opensource.org/osd-annotated

let me quote the German Wikipedia, which is a lot clearer in this point
as the English Wikipedia

> Open Source [oʊpən ˈsɔːɹs] (engl., US), [əʊpən ˈsɔːs] (brit.) und
> quelloffen nennt man Software, deren Lizenzbestimmungen in Bezug auf
> die Weitergabe der Software besagen, dass der Quelltext öffentlich
> zugänglich ist und – je nach entsprechender Lizenz – frei kopiert,
> modifiziert und verändert wie unverändert weiterverbreitet werden
> darf.

As you can see it says clearly that OpenSource means ONLY that you can
look into the source – only the license can permit to
copy/modify/distribute whatever, A common example for a non-free
open-source software is PGP, where you can look into the source but has
to buy it to use it.


The term was coined by the folks from the OSI. See their opinion on open source vs free software: <http://opensource.org/faq#free-software>

Just because the term is often misused to also cover software that is not free and has the source available doesn't mean it's a correct use of the term.
 
> @Dr. trigon: To answer you question what will happen to these tools:
> It is easy, they will die with the toolserver. WMDE and WMF destroy
> them together.
>
>
> Or people are free to move them to infrastructure that isn't funded
> by the donations to a movement that has Open Content as one of the
> five pillars
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_free_content>.
> The tools and bots that keep this content alive and free are in my
> opinion an extension of that pillar.

The goal of Wikipedia is to create, store and provide free knowledge.
How we do this doesn’t matter. Most Wikipedians for example use Windows
as OS, nearly all pictures are taken with commercial cameras (with
unfree firmware), images are modified with Photoshop and videos are cut
with Adobe. And as long as the result is free, that doesn’t matter.
And a word of the goals of donators: They donate for Wikipedia. Not for
the WMF, the WMDE, Labs, Toolserver, Wikidata or free software. If I
remove a single associate of WMF or WMDE it would save more money than
removing the TS BTW.


Tools and bots are depended on by the movement to properly run. They're an extension of the infrastructure. The projects should be forkable and that includes the tools and bots that keep it running.

You're arguing to keep parts of the infrastructure closed source. To what end? How many tools are currently using closed source? How hard would it be to modify them to use open source alternatives? What happens to these tools if they are abandoned? How does this actively benefit the movement?
 
> I'm more than happy to recommend a number of cloud services and am
> more than willing to give advice on how to configure and run tools
> and bots from those services. It's even possible to reuse the work
> we're doing in the tools project, or in the Wikimedia infrastructure
> via our puppet repository since our infrastructure is Open Source.

Very nice idea – how I get the mysql-replication-stream? I got several
offers of donation if the Toolserver would continue; the only problem is
the replication-data. But because the data is open-source, it shouldn’t
be a problem than, should it?


Assuming you found a non-profit, host your infrastructure somewhere that doesn't cause legal issues and every person that has access to the data stream signs an NDA it's likely doable. Of course, what you're proposing is to fork the community and to explicitly split the tool/bot authors from the software developers and operations engineers. You're also doubling resources and used funds. Aren't we supposed to be a collaborative community? Why can't we work together on this?

I don't understand your antagonism. The new environment that's being provided is an infrastructure for building infrastructures and tools is a fork of TS that runs inside of it. It scales horizontally, is well funded, its underlying infrastructure and the database replication is maintained by the foundation's operations team at a production support level, it's completely open source and forkable and it allows and encourages volunteer roots (which could include yourself). We're not killing TS, we're simply providing a new home for it. You're fighting against something that is providing everything you've been asking for and more.

- Ryan