On 17/04/15 19:13, rupert THURNER wrote:
Tim, I am not too sure about this. No single piece of open source software comes to my mind when hearing bay area or silicon Valley.
BSD, sendmail, vi, GTK+ and GIMP, Mozilla, Ceph, Docker.
Do you not have the impression beeing located in the United states poisons the minds of people and has quite a bad influence on the technology output of Wmf?
No.
Did you ever meet some young hungry person with good ideas there willing to contribute?
Yes, we hired some of them.
The only goal of a brilliant person in the this area is to get rich with his own company.
Maybe you should visit some day. Urban California is left-leaning, at least by American standards, full of compassionate, progressive people. San Francisco was at the centre of the hippie movement in the 1960s, and continues to have a leading role in America's civil rights dialogue.
We get a constant stream of prospective employees who say their main reason for wanting to work for Wikimedia is because they want to do something positive with their lives, not just earn money. That would probably be true anywhere, but it underscores the fact that the Bay Area does not "poison their minds".
-- Tim Starling