On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
I think the confusion between "third party support" and "an open
source project" is unhelpful. We're obviously an open source project
with lots of contributors who aren't paid (and many of them are
motivated by Wikimedia's mission), it's just that the project puts
primary emphasis on the Wikimedia mission, and only secondary emphasis
on third party needs. I don't think it's a dirty secret that we moved
to a model of contracting out support to third parties -- there was
even an RFP for it. ;-)
There's open source in technicality and open source in spirit. MediaWiki is
obviously the former. It's hard to call MediaWiki open source in spirit
when the code is dumped over the wall by its primary maintainer. Third
parties get security fixes, but little to no emphasis is put into making it
usable for them. Projects that involve making the software usable for third
parties are either rejected or delegated to WMF projects that never get
resourced because they aren't beneficial to WMF (effectively licking all
those cookies). MediaWiki for third parties is effectively abandonware
since no one is maintaining it for that purpose.
All of this is to say: Wikimedia Foundation shouldn't consider third party
usage because it doesn't as-is. I don't understand why there's a
conversation about it. It's putting constraints on its own architecture
model because of a third party community it doesn't support.
- Ryan