On 10/11/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/10/2007, Brion Vibber
<brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
CMU refuses to open-source the software that runs
that system, using
vague justifications like "it would be hard to replicate the whole
system, so surely no one would want the source".
That's not really the kind of software partner we prefer to work with.
Eurgh. That's ... silly. Do we have any readers with ins at CMU who
can explain to them the advantages of having it on a top 10 website in
a convincing and saleable manner?
It seems likely that if Wikipedia said it would run the captchas if
everything were free and open-source, they would open-source it. I
expect we wouldn't want to participate in any case if it required
using their servers, which it seems to in the general case: would we
want Wikipedia captchas to break if they have some downtime? Could we
implement some kind of reliable way to substitute our own captchas
should that occur? (Like what, ping their server on every captcha
request before we give the response to the request? Slow *and*
unreliable.)