I'd like to chime into the discussion and point out that there is a huge
community around extensions and features that are not used by Wikimedia
foundation - Semantic MediaWiki & co and OpenID to name a few.
These extensions are maintained by 3rd party developers and many of them,
including myself don't have Wikimedia interests as their primary goal.
I run quite a few wikis based on MediaWiki and even though I personally
don't need "Wordpress" easiness and comfortable with creating build
environments using SVN externals and stuff like that, I'm always working
toward general ease of use and Widgets extension I wrote, OpenID picker
contributions as well as some SMW changes I made were always targeted at
users outside of Wikimedia.
So I'd like Wikimedia crowd to acknowledge outside community and their
needs. Don't get me wrong - you guys built a great product and some aspects
of it like internationalization wiki or extensibility or APIs are quite
unique, but Open Source requires open mind with things.
At the same time, I'd like to say that Domas and others are exactly right
about different interests with different parties - if you need something, go
ahead and build it. I spent quite a lot of time coding away things that were
needed for my business and for my personal projects and it's fair. Nobody in
Open Source world is obligated to code for you! Not in Wordpress world
either - they, for that matter had quite lousy software for quite a while
until they did more work on fixing it and it only happened because they have
a commercial enterprise that has different interests then Wikimedia
foundation.
All that being said, I think there is a great opportunity for MW to get even
larger piece of corporate knowledge management market and if you or somebody
else wants to go there and make your money on it, go ahead - companies like
Yaron's WikiWorks, for example will be happy to work with you on it - they
live and breath Mediawikis. Just don't expect that somebody will do work for
you for free only because Wikimedia foundation is non-for-profit and their
projects don't charge money. We all need to eat and software developers are
expansive, especially good ones, especially those who can do both complex
and user friendly software. Don't insult people by saying that they didn't
make something you need, they already spend time that they could've spent on
their families.
Thank you,
Sergey
--
Sergey Chernyshev
http://www.sergeychernyshev.com/
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 5:34 PM, fl <foxyloxy.wikime...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 3 Mar 2010 10:31 pm, Platonides wrote:
> > fl wrote:
> >> I would disagree. The Wikimedia software has been released under an
> >> open
> >> source license: While the WMF certainly has no obligation to improve
> >> the
> >> software, they most definately have an obligation to release the
> >> source
> >> code to third-parties.
> >
> > Wrong. They do it, and it's consistent with their mission, but they
> > have
> > no obligation to do that. They could even have MediaWiki be closed
> > source software.
>
> No, they can't. As far as I am aware, MediaWiki is released under the
> GNU General Public License[1], which stipulates, among other things, the
> requirement to release a program's source code to the public and to
> release any derived changes under the same license[2].
>
> If the WMF were to try and convert MediaWiki to a closed source project,
> they would be liable to legal actions against them.
>
> [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Version
> [2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
>
> --
> fl
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
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