Hi Jonatan,
Thanks for this email, it's relevant to the general wikimedia list &
community.
I broadly agree with you: we should aim to strengthen and expand the
universe of free knowledge, including every building block along the way:
so that others can replicate both toolchain and result on their own
backends.
In practice, I think that means: releasing a Beta feature that uses
non-free libraries is ok, if the goal is to get feedback, test iterations,
and replace them with free libraries. Releasing a completed tool that uses
non-free libraries might be ok if there is currently no free alternative
whatever, and the creation/curation benefits of having the tool are
significant; in such cases we should still plan partnerships or other
methods for replacing those libraries.
When it comes to serving maps, integrating map features with iOS, and OSM:
a more basic issue comes into play. We should support OSM development and
improvement 100% as though it were part of our own mission. Because it
is! Maps are an increasingly large part of knowledge capture, discovery,
sharing, and prioritization. It's important to get this right not just on
the scale of the roadmap of a single feature by a single staff development
team, but as a movement. (The movement devoted to global knowledge access;
not just the subset covered by current .W. projects & tools!) Getting it
right here can mean many things, but definitely includes over time
* Ensuring there is a free map ecosystem that is as good as any proprietary
one
* Working side-by-side with the OSM community, spiritually and practically
(and not alienating one another around minor factional differences)
Clearly OSM benefits from working through any practical/accessibility
reasons that make it hard for app-developers to use OSM maps rather than
Apple Maps. So let's work directly with them to solve this. This WP app
offers a richly detailed use case, and a new channel for people to
potentially discover and contribute to OSM; OSM devs are experts at
identifying existing solutions or building new ones. There are nuances of
how funding / development / production happens across the various
subcommunities, teams, foundations and third-parties, and more than one way
to do it. [does WMF fund pure OSM development in parallel to supporting WP
feature work? Support community development around crossovers between our
networks? does OSM or MB fund some wiki work as part of
outreach+expansion?] This shouldn't prevent getting this right — just as
temporary gaps in a fully free toolchain shouldn't prevent running tests
with a proprietary library in the interim.
Warmly,
Sam
On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 9:59 PM, Jonatan Svensson Glad <
gladjonatan(a)outlook.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm not one who usually writes on these lists, but since it seems like a
good way to get others opinions (and ince I've already formed my own), I
thought it was a good way to see what others had to say and think.
The mobile team for the iOS app (who are all awesome!) has recently
released (in beta) a version of the app which incorporates Apple Maps a one
of it's main feature, to find articles nearby.
"The Wikipedia iOS app has released a beta version (5.4.0 1081) which uses
Apple maps as its map data source. This is not an easy decision and has
already sparked some discussion of whether this is acceptable given our
project's values."
These maps are not free (non-libre) and is in my strong opinion against
our values. We only create and publish things which are freely licensed
(with fair use imagery being the only exception, after a board resolution
regarding EDP's).
Some reasons why this was done can be read here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/iOS/Maps_service
I was asked if we could use non-free elements as long as we said it was
non-free and you may not be allowed to re-ue it, and I responded with "If
we can't find enough editors for Wikipedia, would it ever be alright if we
copied text from Britannica, as long as we said it was from Britannica, and
that reusers can not use it" i.e. just because we can't make something,
doesn't mean we should use something else (non-free thing) to reach our
'wants', if it causes us to loose what is... 'us'.
I'm seeking imput and opinions from you all whether this i allowed or not
our according to values, which states:
"An essential part of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is encouraging
the development of free-content educational resources that may be created,
used, and reused by the entire human community. We believe that this
mission requires thriving open formats and open standards on the web to
allow the creation of content not subject to restrictions on creation, use,
and reuse.
At the creation level, we want to provide the editing community with
freely-licensed tools for participation and collaboration. Our community
should also have the freedom to fork thanks to freely available dumps.
The community will in turn create a body of knowledge which can be
distributed freely throughout the world, viewable or playable by free
software tools."
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