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

[Domas Mituzas]

Hi!

> That technical staff have effective power to decide whether a fork is
> justified is reason enough.


If you tried reading more of the message than just From: header, you wouldn't write this bullshit.

The whole topic is about ease of forking, and:

a) Member of technical staff did not allege that he is making any kind of decision, he just explains that there're tradeoffs to be made
b) It was not being discussed whether "resources to allow forking" are to be spent or not. The message was more about "how much"
c) He also questioned if organization bylaws/format/etc is a high risk, and he solicited feedback.
d) He also wanted to know what is seen as a bad foundation decision worth forking. That is more of a "how not to need a fork" rather than "how not to allow a fork".

I hope you will fix your attitude.

As for resources spent on ease of forking, it can go many ways. 

WMF could be extremely supportive of forks/mirrors/whatever. That is not just about providing a dump, that is also about allowing to query an API for page-loads of remote forks. Essentially, it could become data engine for whatever gets built on top. That is expensive, fundraising becomes inefficient, but here you are, lots of resources and a commitment to spend them just to support forks. WMF could also give initial grants and actually help on fork engineering problems ;-)

WMF could also impose rules on number of articles/data size, to put editors into britannica-like editing more, where each word added is a word removed from elsewhere :-) This would keep projects way more forkable, albeit this would be a catalyst to a fork without such a restriction ;-D

WMF could provide reliable/robust change feeds/distribution mechanisms, including media. Depending on a requested feature set this may be relatively expensive operation (albeit it may be more expensive to be on a receiving end at that time - it is just multitude of polling people that may be costly for WMF ;)

As you see, each of these things may require lesser or bigger MTS participation at the tactical level, k'thx.

Domas