2010/3/5 Chris Lewis <yecheondigi...@yahoo.com>: > I agree 100%, especially the part I bolded. Also god bless the developers and > extension writers for doing this out of their own free time, I guess I > misunderstood the process and thought wikimedia had a code team that was paid. > Some developers are paid employees/contractors, some are not. Obviously the paid developers do what WMF wants them to do (which generally means doing stuff that benefits WMF primarily, not 3rd party users per se) and volunteer developers do whatever the hell they want (and in Chad's case that means overhauling the installer specifically for 3rd party users,
> Also I saw on a news site: > "The foundation has snared an $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation for > the project and plans to assemble a five-person team to identify what exactly > is turning some users off." > $890,000 for only a 5 man team? It would be great if this money went into > some of the common changes people need. > As you quoted, it's a grant, so it's money with strings attached: WMF either gets $890k that they have to spend on what Stanton wants them to do (the usability project), or they don't get the money at all. Also, while $890k sounds like a lot of money, software developers in the San Francisco Bay Area cost a lot of money (cost of living is high there, and there's plenty of big for-profit companies around trying to hire the same people), and there's more costs than just those 5 people's salaries. >>They were not back in 2005 =) > In case you haven't heard, it's 2010 lol. A lot has changed since then. > We have heard. It's just that no one has cared since 2005 apart from the aforementioned Stanton-funded usability team, which developed the Vector skin. Like I said before, if WMF can't or won't dedicate one of their few developers' time to something and no one in the volunteer community cares, it doesn't happen. Roan Kattouw (Catrope) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
