2009/1/25 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>om>:
This is a fairly silly topic, but I'll say two
things:
1) If the CIA or NSA or whoever contributed source code, we would
review them like any other patches. Period. If they're committing
illegal activities or whatever, that's something for the courts to
rule on, and is no business of ours. Our goal (of MediaWiki
developers) is to make good software, nothing else. Someone working
for Microsoft was trying to get commit access to work on MSSQL a while
back, too, and we weren't going to hold it against him. As for adding
subtle "tell the NSA about Wikipedians' browsing habits" stuff, I very
much believe that anyone who would review the patches would be
competent enough to spot deliberately malicious or obfuscated source
code before committing it.
I wouldn't bet on that but that wasn't the case being originally considered.
The case was the wikia case with the CIA replacing wikia. How close
would we be prepared to let WMF people get to the CIA. In theory as
long as the people in question don't have direct access to the WMF
servers there can't be any issues but that is somewhat questionable.
--
geni