I think Steven's interpretation here is pretty sound - yes, it's
legitimate for us to do this, but we should be a bit cautious :-)
Infrastructure tools yes, GIMP probably not.
Andrew.
On 17 April 2014 04:10, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Erik Moeller
<erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On the software side, we have Ubuntu Linux
(itself highly indebted to
Debian) / Apache / MariaDB / PHP / Varnish / ElasticSearch / memcached
/ Puppet / OpenStack / various libraries and many other dependencies [2],
infrastructure tools like ganglia, observium, icinga, etc. Some of
these projects have nonprofits that accept and seek sponsorship and
support, some don't.
One could easily expand well beyond the software we depend on
server-side to client-side open source applications used by our
community to create content: stuff like Inkscape, GIMP and LibreOffice
(used for diagrams). And there are other communities we depend on,
like OpenStreetMap.
Speaking personally, I think we should consider doing this kind of thing on
rare occasions and where there is a critical dependency. There are two
questions that I think are relevant:
1). Do they *really *need our help?
Organizations like Ubuntu and Puppet are in fact supported by for-profit
companies as well as through a FOSS community. There are other examples
here, like Redis and Vagrant. They surely do not need our money to survive.
However, something like MariaDB might, since they're in fact asking us.
2). Would Wikimedia projects be fine, if these other organizations/products
perished?
Seems like we really depend on MariaDB having strong support in the future,
as an open source infrastructure requirement. We moved to Maria in part
because Oracle is a terrible terrible steward of open source, including
MySQL. There are other great FOSS databases out there, but switching to
something like PostgreSQL or a non-relational database (I troll) would be
infinitely more painful. It's in our self-interest as an organization and
for the survival of Wikimedia projects that our database engine is a
healthy open source product.
Products you mentioned which don't pass this test include things like GIMP,
Inkscape, and LibreOffice. It feels like it would be wasteful of donor
money to support something most of our users don't really depend on/we
don't depend on internally at the WMF. We'd essentially be making an
investment in these open source products, not ensuring a critical piece of
our toolkit survives.
Steven
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