[Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave

Mon Aug 15 08:28:36 UTC 2011

On 08/14/11 11:51 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
> On 15/08/11 16:30, David Gerard wrote:
>> 2011/8/15 David Richfield<davidrichfield at gmail.com>:
>>> It's not just financial collapse.  When Sun was acquired by Oracle and
>>> they started messing about with OpenOffice, it was not hard to fork
>>> the project - take the codebase and run with it.  It's not that easy
>>> for Wikipedia, and we want to make sure that it remains doable, or
>>> else the Foundation has too much power over the content community.
>>> Let me make it clear that I currently am happy with the Foundation,
>>> and don't see a fork as necessary.  If the community has a problem
>>> with the board at any point, we can elect a new one.  If things
>>> change, however, and it becomes clear that the project is being
>>> jeopardised by the management, we need a plan C.
>> Pretty much. It's not urgent - I do understand we're chronically
>> underresourced - but I think it's fairly obvious it's a Right Thing,
>> and at the very least something to keep in the back of one's mind.
> So you're worried about a policy change? What sort of policy change
> specifically would necessitate forking the project? Is there any such
> policy change which could plausibly be implemented by the Foundation
> while it remains a charity?
>
> I'm just trying to evaluate the scale of the risk here. The amount of
> resources that we need to spend on this should be proportional to the
> risk.
>

The primary value of a fork(s) is not financial or technical, but 
epistemological.  We are the big kid in the playground, and that has a 
significant effect on the nature of the content. When we work so hard to 
build an aura of reliability readers begin to depend on us. 
Paradoxically, that's not always good. If we are so reliable, the reader 
is not motivated to look elsewhere for alternatives. Natural human 
laziness is bad enough by itself. We too easily fall into the trap of 
treating Group POV as Neutral POV.  Forks, would develop their own 
versions of NPOV, and end up with very different results that are as 
easily reliable as ours, but still different. It becomes up to the 
reader to compare corresponding pages, and draw his own conclusions on 
the matter at hand.

We should not be viewing forks as inherent evils to be resisted at all 
costs. We should be encouraging them, and helping them.

Ray