On 06/01/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
While we run the Subversion repository
You don't, it's on leuksman.com, which is Brion's personal server. svn.wikimedia.org resolves to leuksman through DNS.
My view is that we should make this the consistent, official view and consistently promote and list MediaWiki as a Wikimedia Foundation project wherever other Wikimedia projects are listed. My hope is that, in doing so, we will make MediaWiki more prominent and attract more volunteers to work on it, just as on other Wikimedia Foundation projects. I also believe that this will help in making MediaWiki strategy a key part of the Foundation's general project strategy.
Legally, the Foundation has "MediaWiki" as a registered trademark.
What are other people's thoughts? The only downside I can see is that this might be seen as a move to exercise additional control over the direction of development. But already, all major code changes to the core have to be approved by Brion, who is a Foundation employee. I actually think it will be easier to identify our responsibility towards outside users if we consider MediaWiki to be a key part of the free culture movement that the Wikimedia Foundation must support.
Well, of course it's going to be seen as a "move to exercise additional control over the direction of development", because it is. You wouldn't have wanted to consolidate MediaWiki as 100% under the Wikimedia brand unless you were about to start ordering us to put things in it.
Personally, I don't care; I'm not on the Foundation's payroll, and I don't intend to start taking orders from users or Board members over what I put in the code I voluntarily contribute to an open source project. The only people I've ever directly deferred to are Brion, who is our Benevolent Dictator, and Tim, who is an experienced and senior developer.
Rob Church