On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On the software side, we have Ubuntu Linux (itself highly indebted to Debian) / Apache / MariaDB / PHP / Varnish / ElasticSearch / memcached / Puppet / OpenStack / various libraries and many other dependencies [2], infrastructure tools like ganglia, observium, icinga, etc. Some of these projects have nonprofits that accept and seek sponsorship and support, some don't.
One could easily expand well beyond the software we depend on server-side to client-side open source applications used by our community to create content: stuff like Inkscape, GIMP and LibreOffice (used for diagrams). And there are other communities we depend on, like OpenStreetMap.
Speaking personally, I think we should consider doing this kind of thing on rare occasions and where there is a critical dependency. There are two questions that I think are relevant:
1). Do they *really *need our help?
Organizations like Ubuntu and Puppet are in fact supported by for-profit companies as well as through a FOSS community. There are other examples here, like Redis and Vagrant. They surely do not need our money to survive. However, something like MariaDB might, since they're in fact asking us.
2). Would Wikimedia projects be fine, if these other organizations/products perished?
Seems like we really depend on MariaDB having strong support in the future, as an open source infrastructure requirement. We moved to Maria in part because Oracle is a terrible terrible steward of open source, including MySQL. There are other great FOSS databases out there, but switching to something like PostgreSQL or a non-relational database (I troll) would be infinitely more painful. It's in our self-interest as an organization and for the survival of Wikimedia projects that our database engine is a healthy open source product.
Products you mentioned which don't pass this test include things like GIMP, Inkscape, and LibreOffice. It feels like it would be wasteful of donor money to support something most of our users don't really depend on/we don't depend on internally at the WMF. We'd essentially be making an investment in these open source products, not ensuring a critical piece of our toolkit survives.
Steven