[Foundation-l] CIA/NSA development of mediawiki (was: Wikia leasing office space to WMF)

[geni]

2009/1/25 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com>:
> This is a fairly silly topic, but I'll say two things:
>
> 1) If the CIA or NSA or whoever contributed source code, we would
> review them like any other patches.  Period.  If they're committing
> illegal activities or whatever, that's something for the courts to
> rule on, and is no business of ours.  Our goal (of MediaWiki
> developers) is to make good software, nothing else.  Someone working
> for Microsoft was trying to get commit access to work on MSSQL a while
> back, too, and we weren't going to hold it against him.  As for adding
> subtle "tell the NSA about Wikipedians' browsing habits" stuff, I very
> much believe that anyone who would review the patches would be
> competent enough to spot deliberately malicious or obfuscated source
> code before committing it.

I wouldn't bet on that but that wasn't the case being originally considered.

The case was the wikia case with the CIA replacing wikia. How close
would we be prepared to let WMF people get to the CIA. In theory as
long as the people in question don't have direct access to the WMF
servers there can't be any issues but that is somewhat questionable.


-- 
geni