<quote name="Tyler Romeo" date="2013-04-26" time="06:00:17 -0400">
MediaWiki is violating the license of third party tools it uses.
This is not a clear fact, please don't express it like it is one. The weird part about this issue is that reasonable lawyers can (and probably will) disagree on this very topic. This is one of the biggest lessons I learned while I was played a pretend lawyer for the last half decade ("Copyright Specialist" at University of Michigan, and then all my time at Creative Commons); nothing dealing with (C) is certain, mostly.
There's a reason why the joke about a lawyer's favorite response is "it depends"; because it is true! :-) It depends on the very specific situational facts that would make up a case. And then, again, reasonable minds will disagree. :-)
Now, the question of what MediaWiki developers should do to fulfill the *spirit* of the GPL (or other FLOSS license of a third-party library we use) is up for debate. But please don't make broad claims that anyone is violating a license/copyright law. Assume good faith. I think the MediaWiki developers, of any FLOSS developers, should be people we can assume good faith of.
Greg