On 2 July 2015 at 20:55, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
I am also interested in the answer to Nemo's question about whether this "is the first piece of proprietary software ever entering use in the Wikimedia projects land?"
[not actually relevant, but since you ask ...]
First would have been Java, back when that was non-free - with Lucene running on it as a search engine. Then someone ported Lucene to C# so we used that version on Mono (an all-free stack in copyright terms at least), then Sun promised to free Java so we adopted Java before it was actually free but while the process was underway. I recall Sun also donated some Solaris 10 SPARC boxes which were used for various non-core purposes. This is all off the top of my head and I welcome historical correction.
- d.