A proprietary newsletter software (MailChimp) is being used for no obvious reason. What criteria made MailChimp win over free software competitors like phpList? This should be documented at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FLOSS-Exchange
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We consider this ticket closed. You are welcome to reopen, but it will not be actively monitored. Thank you for your feedback.
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Sure, that's fine. At some point I'll take care of investigating the reasons for this and documenting them in the expected places.
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This task is about wikimediafoundation.org hence readding that project tag as tasks need an associated project tag.
(Personally I don't consider "That's what we've always done" a great explanation.)
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How come CI tests cannot be run for Oracle and MSSQL (T197995) due to the Docker images not being freely licensed, but for a trivial task for which there are (probably better) FOSS replacements proprietary software is suddenly okay and acceptable? This makes no sense whatsoever.
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@ashley: Technically speaking these two things have nothing to do with each other, sorry. Feel free to discuss on a mailing list if you think that discussion should take place. Thanks!
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If this is a task about running proprietary software server-side, they are related, though I'm not sure it actually matters regardless. Even if it's all hosted externally... that would actually be worse.
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The CI team and Wikimedia Operations team don't allow use of non-free software on our servers (with the exception of some firmware/router stuff where there really is no free alternative).
So using an external non-free service is different practically and technically, but yes, in principle it's no different.
I think the most productive way forward is to do what @Nemo_bis asked, and document the reasons for why a non-free mailing list software was picked, so we can work on improving the free software solutions to meet our needs, and eventually switch. I'll update the task title.
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As I was pinged about this task: yes, I still plan to do it in some fashion, although I hoped to find more information from WMF and that hasn't happened yet.
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There is only one tag on this ticket. And the owners of that tag have said they won't be looking at this ticket. Unfortunately that would mean there doesn't seem any way forward for this ticket unless other tags can be found or other venues to contact the people at the foundation who are actually making these decisions.
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Removing task assignee due to inactivity, as this open task has been assigned for more than two years (see emails sent to assignee on May26 and Jun17, and T270544). Please assign this task to yourself again if you still realistically [plan to] work on this task - it would be very welcome!
(See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Assignee_cleanup for tips how to best manage your individual work in Phabricator.)
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It's still true that the only group of people tagged on this ticket has said they will not be looking at it.
I suggest to make it official and have it declined .. or find some tags with people wiling to look at it.
I think this is sad but will remove myself from this now.