On 16 January 2015 at 17:10, Greg Grossmeier greg@wikimedia.org wrote:
<quote name="David Gerard" date="2015-01-16" time="16:27:22 +0000">
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.
"Unforkable" as a binary is not true.
That's why I said "functionally".
"Not easy to fork without implementing all of the pieces carefully" is more accurate. But it's still possible, especially since all of the config/puppet code that is used to do it is open and Freely licensed.
A licence that was the GPL with the additional requirement of attaching 1kg of gold to each copy would be technically free as well, but present difficulties in practice.
What I'm saying is that "technically" is insufficient.
It ain't easy hosting a site this large with this amount of traffic (thanks Ops!) so it's not surprising that "forking" it wouldn't be easy either.
However, at present low-traffic copies are pretty easy.
- d.