Amir I fully understand your arguments... but I see a conflict of interest here: they're encouraging students to write open code on the one hand, and keeping their own code proprietary on the other. Same with Google I guess.
I can also see a cheap and dishonest recruiting process going on here... not to mention the semantics of the #1 proprietary social networking platform in the world associating its name with Opensource and established Universities. It's a win-win (to the nth power!) situation for Facebook. And finally: how would we volunteers at Wikimedia feel if Facebook did the same thing officially and "out in the open" (i.e. earning CSR credits) with us? Tyson Henry has added an interesting comment on the page (last one as of now)... what do you think? Mina ----- Original Message ----- From: Amir E. Aharoni To: Wikimedia Education Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2013 10:00 AM Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Education] An alarming piece of news: Facebook teams with opensource??? Google has been doing similar things for years with Google Summer of Code. So did other organizations. Free software is not necessarily non-commercial. The whole point of Free Software is that everybody should be allowed to do pretty much everything. It cannot and should not be prohibited. Free software may, however, need to adapt to contributions from commercial organizations. When Google tried a few years ago to pay people to fill Wikipedias in languages of India with auto-translated articles, it was a big failure, because the editors community rejected it. When PR companies are filling Wikipedia articles in different with poorly sourced and biased information about their clients, it is also frequently rejected and deleted. A different issue is constructive editing for money or for prizes. Some countries held article writing contests with prizes, and though there was some opposition to them, they didn't hurt the projects in the long run, especially if they already had established communities of volunteer editors at the time of the contest. In any case, very few articles are usually written in such contests. It's unlikely at this point that Wikipedia in any language will be overwhelmed with many thousands of articles written for money, although this may change in the future. Again, we cannot and should not prohibit it, but we may want to think about how we shall adapt ourselves to it. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2013/11/19 Mina Theofilatou <[email protected]> Hello all I just wanted to share a link that I just found. It seems that Facebook is running a campaign to encourage Computer Science students to earn academic credits by contributing to opensource projects: http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/13/facebook-partners-with-22-universities-to-give-compsci-students-academic-credit-for-open-source-projects/#! I don't think Facebook should be allowed to do this. Imagine Facebook tried to pry its way into Wikimedia: I would expect all of us to revolt. A for-profit organization taking advantage of non-profit ideals??? MAKING PROFIT on non-profit? Would they even consider converting THEIR project into an open-source one? Of course not. Don't Mozilla and other Open Source Projects have ways of campaigning to attract CompSci students in their own organisations? Why does Facebook have to be the middleman? I find it revolting... if this is their idea of corporate social responsibility, I'll have to find away to stop using Facebook altogether in reply. _______________________________________________ Education mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Education mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
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