[Foundation-l] Corporate contributions (was Re: [Wikitech-l] Google Summer of Code)

[Evan Prodromou]

On Sun, 2006-16-04 at 15:52 +0200, Dirk Riehle wrote:

> Well, the main solution is to create an ecosystem where people get 
> hired to work (full-time) on providing such extensions (or additions 
> to the mainline) to MediaWiki. Only this setup can provide some continuity.

As far as I know, there are 1-2 programmers working for Wikimedia and
more people working at Wikia on MediaWiki. I just talked today with Jack
Herrick of wikiHow who'd like to see their additions fed back to
MediaWiki.

There are a lot of MW installations out there, and a lot of people
hacking MW code for fun and profit. 

>  But for that to work the MediaWiki 
> community needs be accepting of (corporate) contributions (assuming 
> they follow the licenses and community spirit).

I'm pretty sure that this isn't a problem whatsoever. To be sure, the
main focus of MW has been and will always be Wikimedia's sites, but I
know that the MW team has been very welcoming of patches and additions
at least from Wikitravel in the past.

I think the most likely patches and changes to be accepted are going to
be security and/or performance patches, or extensions that can be easily
plugged and unplugged. Radical changes to the behaviour of the software,
or stuff that's "unwiki", or stuff that is unstable or slows down the
software, is probably not going to get accepted.

> Are there any examples or even defined processes (on meta?) that I 
> could look up?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_extensions

I think just adding a patch to a bug on bugzilla is the fastest way to
get something added to the codebase.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>
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