Thanks Joseph for the links. It's more clear now.
I think I need to clarify something: I'm not against asking the big corps
to pay. If they are using a significant amount of our computational
resources (=donors money) to make even more money, they should pay. And
thank you for improving the movement's financial security. I don't oppose
the general idea.
That being said, what worries me are the details:
* WMF is creating a company (LLC) and contracts that company, this means
less transparency. This is the first time I think in the history of the
foundation AFAIK that WMF is creating a company for legal reasons (I'm
sorry if I missed anything).
* That company is contracting another company for engineering work (even
less transparency). We have lots of engineering resources at WMF.
* As the result, for the first time, code produced by donors money is
closed source and inaccessible to public (or at least I couldn't find the
code linked anywhere)
* I find it ethically wrong to use AWS, even if you can't host it in WMF
for legal reasons, why not another cloud provider.
* There wasn't a period for giving feedback for example about the choice of
cloud provider or anything, suddenly it came out ready. The rumors about it
have been going around for months.
* This has not been communicated properly to the community, I find this
lack of communication and transparency concerning and insulting.
Hope what I'm saying here makes sense.
On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 7:02 PM Todd Allen <toddmal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I tend to agree with this. I'm one of the first to criticize WMF when they
> deserve it (I wish they didn't as often!), but I see nothing wrong with
> consumers of huge amounts of data being asked to chip in to cover the costs
> of providing it. That is, of course, provided that there is never any fee
> for use of the API for users of data in regular amounts, but every plan
> I've seen thus far accommodates that.
>
> Todd
>
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 7:15 AM Ad Huikeshoven <a...@huikeshoven.org> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Great news: the WMF is going to charge the tech giants for using the API
> > millions of times each day. Nothing in the free licenses we use obligate
> us
> > (that is we in our movement) to provide an API for free as in beer. It is
> > part of KAAS: Knowledge As A Service, part of the strategic direction
> > chosen in 2017.
> >
> > Thanks for your understanding,
> >
> > Ad Huikeshoven
> >
> > On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 8:33 PM Amir Sarabadani <ladsgr...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hello,
> > > Today I stumbled upon this public phabricator ticket [1] created by
> > someone
> > > from WMF starting with:
> > > "My team is creating bi-weekly HTML Dumps for all of the wikis, except
> > for
> > > wikidata as part of the paid API project."
> > >
> > > I have so many questions:
> > > - What is the "paid API" project? Are we planning to make money out of
> > our
> > > API? Now are we selling our dumps?
> > > - If so, why is this not communicated before? Why are we kept in the
> > dark?
> > > - Does the board know and approve it?
> > > - How is this going to align with our core values like openness and
> > > transparency?
> > > - The ticket implicitly says these are going to be stored on AWS ("S3
> > > bucket"). Is this thought through? Specially the ethical problems of
> > > feeding Jeff Bezos' empire? (If you have seen this episode of Hasan
> > > Minhaj's on ethical issues of using AWS [2]). Why can't we do/host this
> > on
> > > Wikimedia infrastructure? Has this been evaluated?
> > > - Why is the community not consulted about this?
> > >
> > > Maybe I missed announcements, consultations or anything, forgive me for
> > my
> > > ignorance. Any pointers is enough. I also understand diversifying our
> > > revenue is a good tool for rainy days but a consultation with the
> > community
> > > wouldn't be too bad.
> > >
> > > [1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T254275
> > > [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5maXvZ5fyQY
> > >
> > > Best
> > > --
> > > Amir (he/him)
> > > _______________________________________________
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--
Amir (he/him)
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