Hi All:
I'm still riding the wave of enjoyment I caught at Wikimania in Gdansk, thanks for that :).
One of the topics that came up in my conversations there had to do with Wikimedia's policies surrounding free software.
It is my view that a good portion of 'the sum of all knowledge' is currently embodied in software and programming practice. At the same time, I know that access to knowledge is often done 'by any means necessary'.
Given the potential for confusion and even frustration when rights and responsibilities aren't clear, I think it would be great if the foundation had some clear policies about how it will invest in software development.
I note that this year's GNU Hackers Meeting is taking place very soon; http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/denhaag/ -- Personally I'd love it if future Wikimanias could be co-located with or otherwise bridged with GNU meetings.
Joe
Hello Joe,
It was great to see you in Gdansk; I hope we can find ways to better collaborate with PlanetMath in the future.
On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Joe Corneli holtzermann17@gmail.com wrote:
It is my view that a good portion of 'the sum of all knowledge' is currently embodied in software and programming practice.
Absolutely true.
At the same time, I know that access to knowledge is often done 'by any means necessary'.
That's not generally how Wikimedia works. We have worked for years to support and stick to free formats and free licenses -- including contributing to a clear definition of free content licenses, covering the freedoms that maximize long-term reuse and collaboration... and including investing in the improvement of toolchains around free media licenses, even though that has limited the speed of development of Wikimedia's media collections.
This is definitely not aligned with using 'any means necessary'. When in doubt, we generally prefer to recreate material from scratch than cut corners to be able to use an existing but unfree collection or toolchain.
Given the potential for confusion and even frustration when rights and responsibilities aren't clear, I think it would be great if the foundation had some clear policies about how it will invest in software development.
I don't know of a specific policy about this. I also don't know that we have ever invested a penny in developing software that was not freely licensed. (my guess would be no. is this worth a policy statement? interesting question.)
I do know that there have been arguments in years past about whether or not it was ok for the Foundation to use internal-only tools (for managing meetings, contact databases, finances, &c) that are not open source. As far as I know the conclusion was that where possible, free tools are used,[1] but that there are exceptions.
I note that this year's GNU Hackers Meeting is taking place very soon; http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/denhaag/ -- Personally I'd love it if future Wikimanias could be co-located with or otherwise bridged with GNU meetings.
There are certainly a lot of FSF members on our advisory board and in our developer community. And having RMS speak or attend 3 of 6 Wikimanias should count for something.
SJ
[1] Among other things, even apparently-internal toolsets are important to public access, as you say: chapters grow and come to need all the things that the Foundation does.
Hi SJ:
I've been thinking about your note. Maybe "programmes" would be a better word than "policies". I hope here to put my note in a pro-active frame. In fact there are lots of things that we could do, but here is where it would be nice to know more about who "we" are!
You and I already discussed in person about how useful an education-l mailing list would be for in-depth discussions related to education oriented projects. "We" are to a certain extent involved with changing the way education works (for example).
[1] Among other things, even apparently-internal toolsets are important to public access, as you say: chapters grow and come to need all the things that the Foundation does.
I might also mention that partnerships are likely to be significantly important here (and this is what inspired my initial mail). Suffice to say, my own view as that the right programme would be to make a constellation of completely free and open programs around Wikipedia that enable users to do interesting and useful things with the content. I think we could easily establish some objectives and milestones for the various projects that would fulfill this programme. We can then be fairly clear about what the gaps or obstacles are. I don't mean that everything should happen in a top-down or even centralized way. Rather, I would hope that this conversation would happen in the Wiki Way :).
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org