[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/5/30 Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>:
> 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.

I watched it in the end - it really is a very impressive bit of
software. I don't see much that is new in it, but it brings things
together really neatly. I can see myself using it once it comes out.

> 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.

It's not the software that's important. It's the protocol and the API.
While it would be great if their client was made open and free, that
isn't necessary for it to be a success, as long as the protocol and
API are truly free.