On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Erik Moeller <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I think the confusion between "third party support" and "an open > source project" is unhelpful. We're obviously an open source project > with lots of contributors who aren't paid (and many of them are > motivated by Wikimedia's mission), it's just that the project puts > primary emphasis on the Wikimedia mission, and only secondary emphasis > on third party needs. I don't think it's a dirty secret that we moved > to a model of contracting out support to third parties -- there was > even an RFP for it. ;-) > > There's open source in technicality and open source in spirit. MediaWiki is obviously the former. It's hard to call MediaWiki open source in spirit when the code is dumped over the wall by its primary maintainer. Third parties get security fixes, but little to no emphasis is put into making it usable for them. Projects that involve making the software usable for third parties are either rejected or delegated to WMF projects that never get resourced because they aren't beneficial to WMF (effectively licking all those cookies). MediaWiki for third parties is effectively abandonware since no one is maintaining it for that purpose. All of this is to say: Wikimedia Foundation shouldn't consider third party usage because it doesn't as-is. I don't understand why there's a conversation about it. It's putting constraints on its own architecture model because of a third party community it doesn't support. - Ryan _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
