I see your point on the connection of the two. For Mozilla to move away from the proprietary tools it uses to do its work, there need to be open source alternatives of high enough quality. Those alternatives need investment, investment being MOSS' purpose.
When we used TikiWiki for SUMO, it was an important experience for that team, they made a lot of improvements in terms of usability and understanding what is required to get larger clients to adopt it. Of course we ended up building something to replace it in house instead of continuing to collaborate upstream. I'm not questioning the validity of that choice, but just pointing out that the investment ended. Communities provide a very interesting opportunity to experiment with other open source software. They don't need to move as quickly as MoCo and they can handle bootstrapping with less impact to progress. There are also added incentives to work with upstream teams as communities don't have the same resources to build a fork as MoCo does. We could leverage communities to be incubators for potential tools, and borrow from the tools that work. It would also allow the volunteers from the communities to contribute upwards as they would be the experts on the tool. This is basically what's going on with Discourse. We're collaborating with upstream and volunteers are working on changes that make it better suit Mozilla's needs. It's not quite ready to totally replace similar tools Mozilla uses, but it's close. In the mean time Community Ops volunteers are helping MoFo manage their instances as we have more expertise on it. On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 6:30 AM, Gervase Markham <[email protected]> wrote: > On 03/11/15 05:26, Svetlana A. Tkachenko wrote: > > As a part of that project, I would like to propose to identify and > > eliminate usage of proprietary software by Mozilla. > > Such an effort would not be part of MOSS; it is outside its scope. > However, this forum is the right place to discuss whether Mozilla should > make such an effort, independent of MOSS. > > The following is my understanding of Mozilla's current positions on the > use of proprietary software within the organization: > > 0. We don't have it in our main source code repositories. > > 1. We don't and won't ship it as part of the Firefox browser, except as > in line with the binary components policy: > https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/licensing/binary-components/ > > 2. We don't and won't ship it as part of Gaia and Gecko, the two top > layers of Firefox OS; however, our partners might add their own > proprietary software before shipping the OS on phones. > > 3. We strive to avoid, but sometimes have to use it in Gonk, the lower > layer of Firefox OS - sometimes free software drivers or low-level > components are not available as free software. > > 4. The Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Bugzilla teams also do not ship it. > > 5. When we write server-side software to provide services, we make it > open source. We avoid using closed-source libraries or components. > > 6. We do not have a policy which requires or even recommends the use of > open source software when acquiring third party software for the use > of individuals or in our infrastructure. It would probably be fair > to say that we have an inclination towards open source, and that > inclination varies from person to person and across the > organization's units, but it's not a requirement. > > Which of these things are you proposing we change, and why? > > Gerv > > _______________________________________________ > governance mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance > _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
