[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[SlimVirgin]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 15:10, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com> wrote:
> Let me ask this question. Suppose the Wikimedia Foundation were to buy
> PediaPress from Brainbot, including whatever intellectual property is
> associated with its service such as the LaTeX export. If Wikimedia did
> this and brought the service in-house, assuming the LaTeX export is
> released as open source, it would probably continue to contract with
> Lightning Source or some other company to do the actual printing (our
> competencies are much more on computer and web technology than print
> publication). Assuming that all of this was possible - and I have no
> idea what would be a reasonable price for PediaPress, whether Brainbot
> would sell, or whether that would be an appropriate use of funds in the
> context of our mission and strategy - would people be okay with the
> current placement of the service, including continuing to charge people
> who order printed books?
>
If PediaPress's software is open-source the Foundation surely wouldn't
need to buy it. This is what I'm finding confusing, and that's partly
because of my lack of technical knowledge. But as I see it Wikimedia
has developers, paid and unpaid, lots of people who are able to
develop this kind of thing. So it would have made sense to ask some
volunteers to develop it.

Asking a private company to do these things, then giving them access
to the sidebar in exchange for their input, is the same as asking a
bunch of editors to set up a company and start writing articles for
pay, then giving them sidebar buttons because they joyously agree.