[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Joe Corneli]

> 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.

I'm just saying the reason to kvetch about Pediapress is not that they
produce books or that they are a company that makes money.  The more
serious complaint is that they are presently have monopoly status, and
that this monopoly is mostly made possible because there is no
free/open source toolchain that does what they offer.

There's nothing to stop the interested party from linking to
OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) instead of Google Maps,
and their code is available too
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/The_Rails_Port).  But in any case,
no one refers to Google Maps as an "open source" product.  Referring
to something as "open source" when it isn't is a bad practice.