On 26 October 2010 21:30, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Perhaps Google Apps has some terrific benefits that Wikimedia sorely needs; that was the reason I asked what benefits Wikimedia saw in migrating their systems in my original post. However, from where I'm standing, the cost versus benefits simply don't add up, particularly when you consider what impact this might have from a public relations/perceptions standpoint.
Gmail is just ridiculously better than any other email client I've ever used ever, having previously progressed through Pine, elm, mutt and Thunderbird. Perhaps it's just me, but I'd guess otherwise from the number of Wikimedians with gmail,com addresses. free Google Docs is ridiculously usable for real-time collaboration. More so than anything I've ever used.
I suggest it's quite plausible that the Google versions are so far ahead of self-hosted open source equivalents that we'd be crippling ourselves.
I think the broader issue of Wikimedia using non-open source software is one that needs clarification, as it still seems very murky to me.
It is, of course, quite possible that we should in fact use less good open source equivalents, even if we would be near-crippling ourselves. We're not the FSF and our technology policy isn't set by Richard Stallman. That said, RMS does have the important plus point of having been pretty much right about most things, so we would be very foolish indeed to disregard what I will term the "rabid free/open source software" position out of hand.
Wikimedia is a creature of the broader free culture movement. Erik Moeller, a Wikimedian since the wikipedia.com days and currently WMF deputy CEO, *wrote* the Free Content Definition. We're aggressively neutral about most things, but our essential values stand foursquare for the ideals of that movement: more freedom, more information, refusal of strings attached.
I suppose I'm saying that it's a tricky one. I have a pretty much entirely free software desktop (except Opera for browser checking and Lotus Notes for work [1]) but I still live in my Gmail, and it'd utterly bugger my ability to keep up with my email to give it up,
- d.