Hi everyone,
Splitting the thread off to avoid hijacking it
On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Mitar <mmitar(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think this conversation is diverging from the
question of the
*service* we should offer to others to licensing of the content.
Licensing does not say anything about the service one should offer for
the content. Any service, any API, is more or less something one does
extra on top of the licensing requirements. We could just offer dumps
of data and this is it. But if we offer more, some specialized
services, uptime and availability and so on, that does not have much
with the licensing of the content. That discussion should thus be on
some other layer. Investigating licensing will not give us much
insight into the question if we should go into the business of
offering data services or not.
I think this is a useful way of thinking about the problem. One thing we
discussed quite a bit at the Wikimedia Developer Summit earlier this month
is the distinction between the content format (see "content format" <
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119022>) and the APIs that we use to
access the content (see "content access": <
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119029>)t;).
The two are incredibly easy to conflate, in part because one could argue
that the content format is merely a translatable expression of the
underlying data model. That said, it seems to me that we have to stop
abstracting things *somewhere*, to avoid getting deeply lost in too many
layers of abstraction. If nothing else, we need a "free format" per the
Free Content definition (<http://freedomdefined.org/>).
Mitar, is your layer distinction between "service" and "content" the
same
one that I'm trying to draw between "content format" and "content
access"?
I have further thoughts on this, but I just want to make sure we're talking
about the same distinction.
Rob