Regardless of definition-related issues, I concur editors' most
shared/fundamental needs deserve being addressed spending some money.
Vito
Il giorno mar 12 mar 2019 alle ore 11:50 John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com>
ha scritto:
Without the editors there would be no content, and
thus no readers,
and without readers there would be no use for the software provided.
So is the actual users subsidizing the software? Definitely yes! The
content is the primary reason why we have readers. The software is
just a tool to provide the content in an accessible form to the
readers.
Whether an editor is a customer by subsidizing the product directly or
indirectly is not much of a concern, as long as there will be no
subsidizing at all, from any party – ever, without the content.
The primary customer of the software is the editors, but the primary
customer of the content is the readers.
On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 2:18 AM David Barratt <dbarratt(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
A customer, by definition (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer)
exchanges something of value (money) for a product or service.
That does not mean that a freemium model (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium) is not a valid business model.
However, if there is no exchange of value, the person consuming the free
version of the product or service, is not (yet) a customer.
If MediaWiki is the thing we give away for free, what do we charge money
for?
Are our customers successfully subsidizing our free (as in beer)
software?
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 7:33 PM John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> > 2- Everything is open-source and as non-profit, there's always
resource
> > constraint. If it's really
important to you, feel free to make a
patch
and
the team would be always more than happy to
review.
Wikipedia is the core product, and the users are the primary
customers. When a group of core customers request a change, then the
service provider should respond. Whether the service provider is a
non-profit doesn't really matter, the business model is not part of
the functional requirement. The service provider should simply make
sure the processes function properly.
If the service provider has resource constraints, then it must scale
the services until it gets a reasonable balance, but that does not
seem to be the case here. It is more like there are no process or the
process is defunc.
The strange thing is; for many projects the primary customers aren't
even part of a stakeholder group, the devs in the groups defines
themselves as the "product user group". That tend to skew development
from bugs to features. Perhaps that is what happen in general here,
too much techies that believe they are the primary customers.
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