[Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave

[David Richfield]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 12/08/11 20:55, David Gerard wrote:
>> THESIS: Our inadvertent monopoly is *bad*. We need to make it easy to
>> fork the projects, so as to preserve them.
>
> I must have missed the place where you actually made this case. I
> tried reading your blog posts but I didn't see it there.
>
> In 2005 you said that the point is to insure the data against the
> financial collapse of the Foundation.

It's not just financial collapse.  When Sun was acquired by Oracle and
they started messing about with OpenOffice, it was not hard to fork
the project - take the codebase and run with it.  It's not that easy
for Wikipedia, and we want to make sure that it remains doable, or
else the Foundation has too much power over the content community.

Let me make it clear that I currently am happy with the Foundation,
and don't see a fork as necessary.  If the community has a problem
with the board at any point, we can elect a new one.  If things
change, however, and it becomes clear that the project is being
jeopardised by the management, we need a plan C.

-- 
David Richfield
e^(πi)+1=0