On 16/01/15 21:20, Erik Moeller wrote:
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:14 PM, Ryan Lane
<rlane32(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri,
Jan 16, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Ryan Lane <rlane32(a)gmail.com> wrote:
What you're forgetting is that WMF abandoned
MediaWiki as an Open Source
project quite a while ago (at least 2 years ago).
{{citation needed}}
There was a WMF engineering meeting where it was announced internally. I
was the only one that spoke against it. I can't give a citation to it
because it was never announced outside of WMF, but soon after that third
party support was moved to a grant funded org, which is the current status
quo.
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. ;-)
According to the text of the RfP, it was requesting proposals for
managing the releases themselves. Those are nothing more than the very
end result of the development process, and a part that only faces a
subset of users. The process and content itself is a much larger problem
that cannot so easily be shuffled away, which was, I thought, the entire
reason why the WMF was specifically focussing on that instead. Unlike
the releases themselves, this part is important to all of us, not just some.
Whether this is the best model, or whether it's
time to think about
alternatives, is always up for debate. We just have a legitimate
tension between needing to focus as an org on what donors are
supporting us for, vs. potentially very tangentially related needs
(PostgreSQL support for some enterprise wiki installation).
Erik
This tension applies to all of the non-Wikipedia projects, not just
MediaWiki. Would you say that Commons gathering up images for use on
Wikisource is also something that shouldn't be done, as this is likewise
not a part of the movement that donors tend to know about?
-I