Thread:Project talk:WikiProject Extensions/Extension maintenance/reply (3)

I don't think that's really a fair interpretation of IRS code or WMF's mission statement..
 * "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
 * In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity."

A lot of that language talks about broad applications, supporting an infrastructure, etc. To me, all of that covers the development of tools, like extensions, used by other free-content wiki participating in the broader MediaWiki community of projects that "empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain."

I can wrap my head around this not applying to wikis that are private, or for-profit in nature. However, supporting tools available to any wiki and used by a several different wikis, then paying for it with donations by corporate interests isn't much different than WMF taking corporate donations from companies that have an interest in WMF's software, existence, etc. - such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google. This is pretty typical in the world of nonprofits. A community film festival sponsored by Sony, nonprofit museum's launch party sponsored by Absolut, college video game competition sponsored by Microsoft - there are a number of good examples of what I think Badon is referring to already being applied in similar nonprofits.

See my comments elsewhere for more thoughts on related topics..