On 19/09/2007, Schneelocke schneelocke@gmail.com wrote:
You're not legally required to release anything if you're using a (modified) GPL'ed program to power a public website: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods However, as you say, it would still be the right thing to do, just in order to get that warm fuzzy feeling of having given back to the community that gave you so much that you could build on. :)
Defaulting to releasing stuff rather than not releasing stuff (i.e. release everything by default unless there's some extremely good reason not to) is also of direct benefit to a site, and particularly to try to get stuff into the mainline distro. This benefits you because it saves on maintenance, gets more eyes on the code and avoids maintaining increasingly divergent patch sets yourselves. And means your organisation gets good reputation value as contributors to the codebase in question.
In the case of MediaWiki, doing new stuff as extensions where possible and putting a page on mediawiki.org for it. There's some *amazing* stuff for MediaWiki, far beyond what you see on Wikimedia sites.
- d.