On 8 September 2010 22:15, Jamie Morken <jmor...@shaw.ca> wrote: > 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.
This is something that's been a problem for years now. I do not think there is any sort of deliberate intent. However, keeping the data close is a way to proprietise a wiki even if it's free content, so making it easy to fork is an important attitude to maintain. I realise this is difficult when the devs have to work as hard as possible just to keep everything from falling over ... - d. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
