I had no idea that usurping an open source project was as easy as not
providing full history back-ups and image dumps. And here I was trying
to replace all the board members with proxies from Wikia! What a waste
of time ;)
Ryan Kaldari
On 9/8/10 2:15 PM, Jamie Morken wrote:
Hi,
I was involved in an open source project that was usurped by one of the main developers
for the sole reason of making money, and that project continues now to take advantage of
the community to increase the profit of that developer. I never would have thought such a
thing was possible until I saw that happen. If that developer wasn't acting greedy,
there would now be open source hardware for radio transceivers of all types, but instead
there is only open source software for radio of all types. I find it a shame, and when I
was working on that project I could *feel* it being usurped! I unfortunately may be
paranoid as I feel the same thing here with the wikimedia foundation usurping wikipedia.
If you don't believe me, just consider that it is a very gradual process, like getting
people used to not being able to download image dumps anymore, and ignoring ALL requests
to restore this functionality. Also failing to provide full history backups of the
flagship wiki. These two facts allow the wikimedia foundation to maintain the control of
intellectual property that wasn't created by the people. If you want the wikimedia
foundation to respect you as volunteers, you will have to DEMAND respect by making sure
that they never usurp the project. I think the best way to do this is to make sure we can
all download up to date full history with images wikipedia's so a fork at any time is
possible. Sure it may be paranoid, but trust me it is worth it to be paranoid regarding a
project as important as wikipedia. I have been in situations like this before, I wish I
had acted before even if I was wrong! I wouldn't even be speaking now except for
reading the heart-felt words of volunteers in this thread that are unhappy with how the
wikimedia foundation is running. We need to organize to get wikimedia foundation to
release images tarballs, they are only ignoring multiple requests to do so, so far.
cheers,
Jamie
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l