[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Magnus Manske]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Joe Corneli <holtzermann17 at gmail.com> wrote:
> What people seem to have been stepping around in this thread so far is
> the fact that Pediapress's software chain includes some components
> that they have NOT released as open source.  There seems to be ongoing
> confusion about this.  If there was an open source toolchain for doing
> what Pediapress currently does, then Wikimedia itself or any third
> party organization or individual could use it to create manuscripts
> suitable for printing, and use any printer they liked to achieve that
> end.  I think the crux of the argument should be: is it OK for
> Wikimedia to have a partnership with a service provider who uses
> closed source software as an integral part of the service they
> provide.  Pediapress sets a precedent that says "yes, that's
> completely fine".  And maybe it is, but it is then just wrong to refer
> to this as an "open source" way of working.

Wikimedia policy is to use only free software, at least on the
"customer-facing" side. That includes the PDF-generation process,
which runs on our servers AFAIK.

Requiring this from sites we (in essence) link to seems excessive. We
link to Google Maps via an intermediate page, similar to PediaPress,
and their code is not 100% open source either, last time I looked.

Cheers,
Magnus