On 09/06/12 09:46, Rob Lanphier wrote:
I've long mused out loud about this possibility, but I've become less certain over time that this is a good outcome based on what happened with Mozilla Messaging (spun out to work on Thunderbird, then folded back into Mozilla). The overhead of yet another organization wasn't worth it for them, and probably won't be worth it for us.
The two organisations would have to compete for senior staff, instead of the time allocation being internally managed. I'm not sure who would win.
That said, I think there is a structural problem here, and I'm glad Mark has started the process of making release management something that has more volunteer involvement. The needs of running the Wikimedia family of websites are strikingly different than the needs of small websites who want a simple-to-install wiki. For that matter, they are very different than the needs of large websites that need wiki software, but consider it a commodity that they don't want to think about very much, rather than as their core product. Without the concerted involvement of people who understand and are good at balancing those concerns, we'll do a poor job of serving those folks. We'll be able to empathize and guess, and probably continue to do alright, but due to human+organizational nature, it'll probably never be as great as it could be.
We could do better than how we're doing now, if the WMF executive recognised it as something we can legitimately spend time on.
Just because a separate standalone MediaWiki entity isn't necessarily viable, that doesn't mean that we can't figure out how to make the release process a little more community-driven, so I'm glad there seems to be momentum around outside contributors participating more actively here.
The problem with community involvement is that the community is continually undermined by the WMF, which hires all the best volunteer developers and assigns them to work on things that benefit the Wikimedia wikis.
Doesn't the WMF have a responsibility to contribute back to the community from which it draws so much code and talent?
-- Tim Starling