2010/10/26 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
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.
That's the gist of it. Our general policy is to be as open on internal tools as reasonably possible, which includes giving people an Ubuntu laptop even if they've only ever seen that name on a restaurant in Napa. [1] It also includes pretty substantial investment in some open tools where we can make a significant difference through our adoption and support, e.g. CiviCRM.
We've still got lots of Macs, but are gradually moving away from them where we can; we've standardized on OpenOffice.org (soon LibreOffice?) for formatting documents, and of course we use wikis extensively for sustained collaboration. I've started a page a while ago to publicly document the internal tools use of WMF and other players in the Wikimedia movement:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FLOSS-Exchange
We've recommended Thunderbird in the past (with some folks sticking with GMail, yours truly included), but unfortunately it doesn't meet all our needs. We're reluctantly switching to GMail as the standard email solution, but we'd love to switch to an open solution in future. Jon Davis can elaborate a bit on the assessment process. Naturally folks will be able to continue to use open source clients.
Google Docs is a great collaborative drafting tool (as is Etherpad, which is open), but I don't want us to become dependent on it -- for any document that needs to be worked on over sustained periods of time, it ends up being moved out of GD. I'd love to see at least a basic MediaWiki/Etherpad integration, it would give MW a huge productivity boost for real-time note-taking and collaboration.
[1] http://www.yelp.com/biz/ubuntu-restaurant-and-yoga-studio-napa