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