[Foundation-l] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments

[Teofilo]

2010/9/7, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>:

> Presumably this conspiracy would have to extend beyond the WMF to
> PediaPress and Purodha Blissenbach, the developers of Collection and
> mobile.wikipedia.org respectively.

The absence of a history tab in the mobile format is in my view an
exact measurement of the temperature of the warmth of the relations
between the WMF and its contributors.

Let's not call this a conspiracy. Philosopher Pierre Bourdieu  would
call it an unconcious strategy (1). Developping software costs money
and time. Maybe especially time. Developping both feature A and
feature B is too expensive when most people will care only for feature
A. Feature B is dropped because people who had feature B in mind feel
that they will not be rewarded for it and they stop insisting for it
and it finally fails from being included in the specification. And yes
the outcome is that people did a great job developping feature A.

(1) [His] theory seeks to show that social agents develop strategies
which are adapted to the needs of the social worlds that they inhabit.
These strategies are unconscious and act on the level of a bodily
logic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu