<quote name="Matthew Walker" date="2013-10-01" time="12:32:08 -0700">
the org has permission to use the MediaWiki name/logo/domains
Name and Logo sure -- but why domains? This shouldn't be an exclusive thing; we should not be moving towards having only one shop offering this service. Maybe the WMF could have some sort of 'partners' program that handled licensing.
only if domain includes the trademark, of course.
MediaWiki documentation endorses the organization doing the hosting/support (need general consensus with the developers, many but not all of whom are WMF employees)
I don't think I can express how much I loathe organizations that do this. Varnish and Adiscon (rsyslog) are two offenders that come to mind. It seems to create an ecosystem where a new user assumes they must use the hosting provider for an install. And/or that any new features the vendor develops can be locked away and never documented except very sketchily in code. I don't mind having a page on mediawiki.org that would say something along the lines of 'if you dont want to host yourself...' but otherwise I feel the documentation / main site should be kept as neutral as possible.
I wanted to chime in here:
The idea that Brion expressed, I believe, is what we were going for with the public RFP for the MW Release Management work. It showed community support and something to point at (by anyone) if a weird decision was made (or interpreted as such).
So, maybe the default install doc shouldn't say "Step 1: Create account at $Prefered_Vendor" but we can definitely have "known good vendors" listed somewhere...
(just my personal opinion, not that my professional one should be taken as anymore more than that either, really)
Greg