I propose to introduce votes for all issues, including bug reports, and feature requests.

Say that to any MoinMoin user interested in the develpoment of this wiki engine (which means anybody with an account in this wiki) 3 votes are granted. He or she may now vote for any bug that he or she wishes to be fixed soon, or to any feature request that he or she wishes to be implemented soon, by assigning it 1, 2, or 3 points until all of the user's votes are used. E.g. you could vote for 3 issues by giving 1 point to each of them, or for 1 issue by giving it all 3 of your points.

You could find at the end of a bug report or feature request page like, say, FeatureRequests/SectionEditing, a line like that:

Votes: {*} {*} {*} {*} {*} {*} {*} {*} {*} {*} {*}

where the 1st 3 votes are from user A, the 4th from user B, the 6th and the 7th from user C, and so on, but we could also ask users to sign their votes.

That way it would be very much clearer which features are more requested than others, and which bugs do bother more than others, and, hopefully, making MoinMoin fitting more to its users needs.

From my experiences with open source projects following a dual license policy, I can't encourage that. Basically, one problem is that code contributions can very easily result in a fork. Dual license is OK if there is only one single copyright holder, because in that case license terms regard only the (re-)distribution of the code, not it's modification. But if you accept third party code contributions—and I guess you would, as otherwise you hadn't chosen a FOSS licensing model—license terms regard also the modification of the code. And any contributor has—as any other user of your code—first to chose under which license terms he is going to modify and re-publish your code. It is completely legal and legitimate to republish the modified code under one of the two original licenses only. This might prevent third party contributions to become part of the core code upstream. And this is not exactly how FOSS software development should work. Even if you re-licensed the code under LGPL "v.2 or later" (which you may, if you are the copyright holder for the work as a whole), there would be a similar problem, as the license explicitly allows to re-publish the code under the terms of the GPL, but once it is GPL, there is no way back to LGPL. IMHO the basic problem is that MoinMoin has no clear policy like we appreciate GPL v.2 licensed contributions.

Maybe this chart clarifies the situation:

licenses

Note you must not “mix” GPL2 and GPL3—you can always invoke only one license for copying/modifying one work as a whole. But in some cases you may re-license a work under different license terms—but note the directions of the arrows. Please see also http://www.fsf.org/quick-guide-gplv3-announcement on this topic.

MoinMoin is, more or less, the green field in the middle with the boldface text saying “GPL2 or later”. Thus, it seems most reasonable to license code injections for MoinMoin under “GPL2 or later” or “LGPL2 or later”—but in the latter case the is no possibility for code reflux.

-- MartinBayer 2007-11-10 16:09:50

Messages to me

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler", as somebody said. I know that to usability and ergonomic is not paid the attention they deserve. But as I do care about them, I will continue to contribute usability observations to the development projects of MoinMoin: I believe that enhancing MoinMoin's usability is the best contribution to its development.

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MoinMoin: MartinBayer (last edited 2008-02-15 14:04:12 by MartinBayer)