Matanya Moses

Tags	Communities, Open Source
Primary Session	Embracing Open Source Software
Secondary Sessions

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Mediawiki is built on the basis of many other open source tools, libraries, packages and other software types. Our ability to write, run and use Mediawiki depends on their availability, support of the upstream and maintainability. As a few examples, debian, the OS WMF is running, PHP, or Elasticsearch, our search back end.

In the light of recent discussions of migration from HHVM, to zend php as our runtime, I would to raise the discussion point of what is our position in the open source world of the underlying parts of our stack. Wether we choose the be just a user of what upstream produces, or we want to actively influence the decisions made while writing the software.

In order to be able to influence the decisions made while writing the software as the known phrase says: "decisions are made by those who show up" we will need to show up in those communities, but an active part in them and contribute, in the exact same manner we hope third party mediawiki re-users will contribute, discuss, send patches and show up.

If we are to choose this path, it has resources implication, Time, money and dedication to involvement in other communities. For instance, having sponsoring a php developer working on our needs upstream for instance might be a good investment but might be a waste as whole.

I would like to have an open discussion about this approach, whether it is desired, feasible, and worth the effort. I think it might affect where our tech stack will be in the years to come and has a significant statement towards the outside open source ecosystem.

Thank you