Hi, I was involved in an open source project that was usurped by one of the main developers for the sole reason of making money, and that project continues now to take advantage of the community to increase the profit of that developer. I never would have thought such a thing was possible until I saw that happen. If that developer wasn't acting greedy, there would now be open source hardware for radio transceivers of all types, but instead there is only open source software for radio of all types. I find it a shame, and when I was working on that project I could *feel* it being usurped! I unfortunately may be paranoid as I feel the same thing here with the wikimedia foundation usurping wikipedia. If you don't believe me, just consider that it is a very gradual process, like getting people used to not being able to download image dumps anymore, and ignoring ALL requests to restore this functionality. Also failing to provide full history backups of the flagship wiki. These two facts allow the wikimedia foundation to maintain the control of intellectual property that wasn't created by the people. If you want the wikimedia foundation to respect you as volunteers, you will have to DEMAND respect by making sure that they never usurp the project. I think the best way to do this is to make sure we can all download up to date full history with images wikipedia's so a fork at any time is possible. Sure it may be paranoid, but trust me it is worth it to be paranoid regarding a project as important as wikipedia. I have been in situations like this before, I wish I had acted before even if I was wrong! I wouldn't even be speaking now except for reading the heart-felt words of volunteers in this thread that are unhappy with how the wikimedia foundation is running. We need to organize to get wikimedia foundation to release images tarballs, they are only ignoring multiple requests to do so, so far.
cheers, Jamie _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
