[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Tim Starling]

Milos Rancic wrote:
> On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> It's not free software. The blog post says they "intend to open source
>> the code". That generally means the code quality is so bad that they'd
>> be embarrassed to make it public, and would like to clean it up to the
>> point where humans can understand it, but currently they have more
>> important development priorities and no schedule to do such a thing.
> 
> This is why that (very long) presentation is important. They clearly
> said that they want to make their implementation as the referent open
> source implementation.

Funny, that's exactly what the blog post said, which I just quoted. I
guess I was right not to waste an hour of my Saturday watching that
presentation.

Wanting it to be free software does not make it free software. The
code has to actually be published with a permissive license. Until
then, it is proprietary software.

-- Tim Starling