On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:27 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 16 January 2015 at 16:09, Antoine Musso hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
So what we might end up with:
- Wikimedia using the SOA MediaWiki with split components maintained by
staff and the Wikimedia volunteers devs. Code which is of no use for the cluster is dropped which would surely ease maintainability. We can then reduce MediaWiki to a very thin middleware and eventually rewrite whatever few code is left.
- The old MediaWiki PHP based is forked and given to the community to
maintain. WMF is no more involved in it and the PHP-only project live it's on life. That project could be made to remove a lot of the rather complicated code that suits mostly Wikimedia, making MediaWiki simpler and easier to adjust for small installations. So, is it time to fork both intent? I think so.
This is not a great idea because it makes WMF wikis unforkable in practical terms. The data is worthless without being able to run an instance of the software. This will functionally proprietise all WMF wikis, whatever the licence statement.
So far all of the new services are open source. If you want to work on forking Wikimedia projects you can even start a Labs project to work on it. I don't think this is a concern here.
- Ryan