Daniel Mayer wrote:
I personally don't have a distaste for ads - they
just annoy me a bit. But I do
have a distaste for the thought of forks such as with Enciclopedia Libre. This
is especially dangerous now that chapters are being set-up that could fund a
successful fork.
If a Wikimedia chapter wants to buy servers for their language wiki to
avoid slow, poor-quality service or site-wide advertising, then we
should give them our blessing. We should also give them a conditional
license to use the Wikipedia name, access to private SQL dumps and full
technical support. And once they have their hardware set up, we can set
the relevant DNS entries to point to them. We can help them with backups
and redundancy with a slave database server in Florida replicating all
writes. In order to allow software upgrades, maintenance tasks and
future features such as shared logins, it would be nice if all the
developers with shell access to the Florida servers also had shell
access to the foreign servers.
Forking is a bad thing because it implies duplicate effort from editors.
But I see no reason to fear distribution. The French chapter is
prohibited by law from sending most of their money to Florida, so in the
future it might be best for them to contribute hardware.
-- Tim Starling