Michael Holloway
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Free Software is Fundamental to Our Mission
Position
MediaWiki is a prominent free software project, and the Wikimedia projects have always run on free and open-source technology, but our relationship to free and open-source software needs clarification. We should formalize that we are committed to making, using, and leading in the development of free software, even when doing so is more difficult or less efficient in delivering user value than adopting closed solutions, as a central part of our educational mission.
Discussion
How does free software relate to the free knowledge movement?
In this movement we are building a body of open knowledge, curated collectively and accessible to all. We develop the software that powers these projects in the open, and we run our backing infrastructure on free and open-source technology.
We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Existing free software is not always, or even most of the time, practically superior.[1] We work in the open so that others can contribute to and learn from our processes; our work product is educational content in its own right, and in that way directly contributes to our mission.[2] By ensuring that our tools and processes are open, and working through problems with free software projects rather than rejecting them in favor of closed solutions, we empower others everywhere to join us in doing this hard work, or to launch like-minded projects of their own.
It's often tempting to conclude that our users could be better served by adopting closed or proprietary software solutions to our engineering problems, rather than adapting free software to meet our needs or writing our own. This may be true in the short term, but over the long term this contributes to the cloistering of software engineering expertise in closed commercial enterprises.
Our goal is to expand and not restrict the knowledge of software engineering principles and practices, and we are playing a long game.
What could a formal commitment to free software mean in practical terms?
This is intended as an open-ended question for discussion, but here are a few ideas:
- We should take a leadership role in the development of free software languages and technologies on which we depend (e.g., PHP).
- Where we develop software for closed platforms (such as the mobile apps), we should promote free alternatives for their distribution channels (e.g., F-Droid [3]) and ensure they can be run without depending on proprietary software.
- We should encourage and recognize contributions by our engineers in the broader free software community.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/when-free-software-isnt-practically-superior.html [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement [3] https://f-droid.org/
