[Foundation-l] free software policies

[Samuel Klein]

Hello Joe,

It was great to see you in Gdansk; I hope we can find ways to better
collaborate with PlanetMath in the future.

On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Joe Corneli <holtzermann17 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It is my view that a good portion of 'the sum of all
> knowledge' is currently embodied in software and
> programming practice.

Absolutely true.

> At the same time, I know that access to knowledge is often
> done 'by any means necessary'.

That's not generally how Wikimedia works.  We have worked for
years to support and stick to free formats and free licenses -- including
contributing to a clear definition of free content licenses, covering
the freedoms that maximize long-term reuse and collaboration...
and including investing in the improvement of toolchains around
free media licenses, even though that has limited the speed of
development of Wikimedia's media collections.

This is definitely not aligned with using 'any means necessary'.
When in doubt, we generally prefer to recreate material from scratch
than cut corners to be able to use an existing but unfree collection
or toolchain.

> Given the potential for confusion and even frustration
> when rights and responsibilities aren't clear, I think it
> would be great if the foundation had some clear policies
> about how it will invest in software development.

I don't know of a specific policy about this.  I also don't know that
we have ever invested a penny in developing software that was not
freely licensed.  (my guess would be no.  is this worth a policy
statement?  interesting question.)

I do know that there have been arguments in years past about whether
or not it was ok for the Foundation to use internal-only tools (for
managing meetings, contact databases, finances, &c) that are not open
source.  As far as I know the conclusion was that where possible, free
tools are used,[1] but that there are exceptions.

> I note that this year's GNU Hackers Meeting is taking place
> very soon; http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/denhaag/ --
> Personally I'd love it if future Wikimanias could be
> co-located with or otherwise bridged with GNU meetings.

There are certainly a lot of FSF members on our advisory board and in
our developer community.  And having RMS speak or attend 3 of 6
Wikimanias should count for something.

SJ

[1] Among other things, even apparently-internal toolsets are
important to public access, as you say: chapters grow and come to need
all the things that the Foundation does.