On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 3:58 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
I was gobsmacked to find that the reflinks tool had not been carefully transitioned and no plan for it was in place,
Me too, to the extent I'm gobsmacked by anything these days. My students love this tool, it's one of the primary things that help make the crucial transition from "I'm a newbie" to "I can take care of my own needs as a writer on Wikipedia."
The way forward is clearly to identify the requirements for the specific tools. Hosting on WMFlabs can have any rules
It seemed to me that one of the legacy problems that was supposed to be addressed by the transition from toolserver to WMFlabs was to ensure that source code is freely licensed and available. So this leads me to a question, maybe others in this discussion know the answer, but I don't:
Is Reftools FOSS? Is the source code available? If so, why isn't somebody else just migrating it to WMFlabs, and what can be done to help that happen?
And if not, maybe we'd be better off if we found a way to build a replacement tool under a FOSS license?
-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]