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

[David Gerard]

2011/8/15 David Richfield <davidrichfield at gmail.com>:
> 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.


Pretty much. It's not urgent - I do understand we're chronically
underresourced - but I think it's fairly obvious it's a Right Thing,
and at the very least something to keep in the back of one's mind.


- d.