On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 10:15 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
I think I'd add "general direction of centralizing everything under a single Wikimedia Foundation is a bad idea" as a permanent blocker.
As others have noted, there's a difference between offering data (which we do - we've spent a lot of time, money and effort to ensure that stuff like dumps.wikimedia.org works reliably even at enwiki scale) and providing a working environment for the dev community.
Having a primary working environment like Labs makes sense in much the same way that it makes sense to have a primary multimedia repository like Commons (and Wikidata, and in future probably a gadget repository, a Lua script repository, etc.). It enables community network effects and economies of scale that can't easily be replicated and reduces wasteful duplication of effort.
That said, I'd love to make more real-time data feeds available for third parties in general. The analytics team is currently looking into offering a sensible alternative to the IRC feed for edit metadata, for example.
Erik