David Gerard wrote:
On 10/04/2008, Simetrical wrote:
Not only is reCAPTCHA closed-source, it also adds a dependency on third-party servers. If their servers go down -- they might not be prepared for the load of a site like Wikipedia -- people presumably won't be able to log in, without expensive and unreliable uptime checks on our part. It adds another point of failure.
If reCAPTCHA were free software - or if someone duplicated its functionality in free software - and it were running on a Wikimedia server, would it (or something like it) be something we'd likely run? Given its usefulness to the world of getting public domain stuff from image to text form.
- d.
Probably. But the third party dependency can be avoided if we just provide their Audio captcha as an alternative to our FancyCaptcha. The number of queries to handle would be much lower, and if they went down, we would be exactly as now. However, they may not like being used for audio without filling in the text ones.