Olivier Beaton wrote:
p.s. I'm cc'ing wikitech-l not just out of frustration, but because I feel my feedback provides a meaningful contribution to the discussion Yaron started weeks ago on this very topic of access -- one which has seen near zero transparency in the community.
I found much of your e-mail to be insightful. Thank you for sharing it.
While full of optimism and excitement in mid-September, while constantly active in #mediawiki for over a month, the attitude of the developers (who you do not name, where's the transparency in this process?) and yourself have just leeched out any energy I have towards the MediaWiki community.
The process has evolved quite a bit over time. At some point, it was on MediaWiki.org. Tim moved it to an OTRS queue and now there's some sort of Star Chamber involved in deciding who gets commit access. The current process and procedure is antithetical to Wikimedia's and MediaWiki's operating principles of openness, transparency, and a low barrier to entry. I think a few people realize this/have realized this, but the prevailing view among them is largely "fuck it, we'll switch to git soon and this won't be such an issue." You should not believe that everyone is supportive or accepting of the recent trends against transparency, though. That isn't the case.
At no point was any attempt made to contact me in IRC (despite my high level of participation there) to speed up this process in any manner, to ask for clarification or voice concerns. Instead it's been 7 weeks of silence with sudden burst of "produce this -- sorry no answer yet, with heavy undertones of doesn't look good".
Speed has never been a strong point of Wikimedia or MediaWiki development.
There seems to have been concern with my original license, a BSD-2-Clause with copyright assignment so I don't lose the ability to distribute my code, this isn't the GPL, you need a contributor agreement with BSD (as I understand it). Yet absolutely no effort was made to communicate these concerns to me, or to work out what those issues were and how they could be resolved. I happen to have stumbled upon another project that had a more elegant solution to the BSD contribution problem (with a different type of contributor agreement) and it seems like that may have cleared things up. But I'm guessing here. From your emails it sounded like you were just ready to turn it down with a "Sorry we don't agree with your license". During which time no attempt was made to look at the code sample, just playing cat-and-mouse for weeks on a licensing concern to now arrive at a cat-and-mouse for weeks on code samples.
The license issue sounds like a red herring. The basic requirement is that your code be compatible with the code it adapts/modifies and that it be FOSS. If people are getting caught up in petty copyright bullshit paranoia, they need to be taken out 'round back.
To make it clear, I've never asked for core access, I'm not trying to mess up your project, all I wanted to do was be able to participate on equal footing in the community with other extension developers, to co-exist and grow and share knowledge. To take advantages of tools like code-review, the familiarity people have with the MW repo (and other who can contribute to it!) and distribution system.
To be frank, the fact that you're able to compose coherent sentences makes you more skilled than a lot of the current people who have (full) commit access. Granted, the standards used to be a lot lower. But some of the people with full commit access are sometimes brilliantly bad. Some are even being paid to write bad code. :-/ I'm surprised they haven't approached you to be a contractor, given some of the people Wikimedia has been hiring lately... ;-)
You've made it painfully clear to me, and gauging from the message left by Yaron, to others as well, that despite all the smiles and nice words: We're not welcome.
The smiles and nice words seem to be a lot of passive-aggressiveness. I've seen some similarly disturbing behavior lately on Bugzilla, where patches are greeted with "great, thanks for submitting this patch; we haven't reviewed it, but maybe at some point we might; why don't you contribute more in the meantime?" There's a lot of presumption that people are interested in coding for MediaWiki, which has got to be in the running for most demeaning and demoralizing experience. The talented and untalented alike are flatly ignored on Bugzilla. People wanting to get code reviewed in SVN aren't likely to have much more luck either.
The amount of potentially free code that gets squandered every day would blow your mind. Instead of focusing on developing a community where people are interested in contributing code (and where they receive positive feedback from doing so), there's a system where only a few people have a chance of having their code reviewed or deployed within six to twelve months, otherwise you're SOL. It's been like this for a while and I think a lot of people agree that it sucks. I wouldn't hold my breath for it getting better any time soon.
The long and short of my advice is this: fuck MediaWiki. If they're unwilling to accept your contributions, there are a lot of other FOSS projects that would be happy to have you. Thrilled to have you, even. I'd strongly encourage finding one. :-)
MZMcBride