[Toolserver-l] Changes to expired accounts web hosting

[River Tarnell]

Martin Peeks:
> The default copyright stance, unless a licence specifies otherwise, is
> "All Rights Reserved". I don't think we have the right to enforce a
> licence that is all about freedom unless a user opts-in.

We can require that all users use a free license for their tools, make this 
clear to them at account request time, and if they fail to do so, they are 
simply breaking the rules, which we already have a policy to deal with.  
(And no, it's not as simple as "just userdel".)

> Closed source software can be as good as open source software - do
> remember that.

The issue here is nothing to do with whether the software is good or not.  
No one is suggesting that tools will somehow become much better because 
they're open source, and (unless I missed it) no one is suggesting that 
tools should be open source for ideological reasons, only for pragmatic 
reasons.

The issue is that when users leave, and their tools have no free license,
those tools go away and cannot be revived.  So, we need to balance freedom
for users with the ability to transfer ownership of tools after the owner 
leaves.

With that in mind, there are three options:
* Do nothing.
* Require all tools to be open source
* Require all tools to be multi-maintainer projects, and further require 
  that MMTs must be open source.
  
If we do anything other than "do nothing", the downside is that all users 
who are unwilling to open source their tools will leave.  While that's not a 
problem in itself, it means any such tools might no longer be available (if 
the owner can't find other hosting), or might only work in a reduced form 
without database access.  This is clearly detrimental to Wikimedia projects, 
so it's something we want to avoid.

The downside of staying with "do nothing" is that all non-open-source tools 
will no longer be available once the owner leaves.  This is an active and 
ongoing problem that leaves many useful tools inaccessible or broken.

Now, while I haven't done any actual research on this, it seems quite likely 
to me that the number of tools we would lose from requiring open source is 
much lower than the number we currently lose from inactive maintainers.  
Given that we can't have both options, it's clear that requiring open source 
is the better one.

The actual details of how to do this is a separate discussion and not
relevant to this issue...  but fear not, I will definitely not support a
policy that requires a viral license like the GPL for tools.

> While (imo) WM-DE should support free and open source software, this can
> be done in other ways.  For example, by using a free and open source
> webserver rather than the current Zeus (which is to my knowledge
> closed-source - at least I cannot find source on their site).

It seems unlikely to me that Zeus will go out of business in the near 
future.  On the other hand, users go "out of business" all the time, leaving 
their widely-used, unlicensed tools broken and unmaintainable.  So, leaving 
aside ideological reasons (which I have no time for), there is very little 
reason to change from ZWS, but a very good reason to require freely licensed 
tools.

       - river.
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