On 16/01/15 21:20, Erik Moeller wrote:
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:14 PM, Ryan Lane rlane32@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Ryan Lane rlane32@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