On 3/22/16 12:15 AM, James Salsman wrote:
Is there a list of equipment that WMF uses without viable FLOSS alternatives, please?
Since the context here is t-shirts, I think we can understand Coren's remarks in a very broad context, and so of course he's right. We might choose to only do business with t-shirt manufacturers who use open source software, but it is not clear that we'd find any.
I have always been a strong advocate of looking for FLOSS solutions for as many things as we can. This is particularly true for things that directly impact the freedom of the website(s). (I'd strongly oppose running Wikipedia on a proprietary database platform, for example.)
And I like favoring vendors who are FLOSS-friendly, even if they are t-shirt partners. It sounds like Shopify are ok in the regard (I haven't personally checked).
But there are many many vendors we need to work with where it will be completely impractical to demand FLOSS purity. The lawyers who are suing the NSA? Our auditors? The venues for Wikimania?