These 'developments' are scams. The head developer is affiliated with pediapress.com (a for profit company).
The longer these "developments" take place, the more people will use their paid services!
Conflict of interest. No free stuff, people will pay!
Dear pediapress.com, tell me that your sales does not quadruple since the pdf service has shut down?
Corrupt.
That is childishly silly. The project spent several years failing badly, before PediaPress offered to help us out. The new code is open licensed. By doing this they are actually reducing their potential to make money off their PoD service. They are good people. To be perfectly clear to you, I have no business relationship with PediaPress, other than buying a few printed books off them. I hope they did make a little beer money!
Hi,
I kind of see that there is conflict of interest problem with that too. And mixing computer science with w:Token economy seems generally a bad choice to me. So I keep http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ updated to provide an alternative export to pdf epub and odt fully open source and available on Debain. It will be interesting to see how both projects will evolve in the future.
Yours Dirk
a. Concepts like "assume good faith" and "civility" are at the core of what we do for a reason. Please don't poison the discussion climate. It is perfectly possible to discuss potential conflict of interest in a way that is in line with Wikimedia norms and expected behavior.
b. A fair chunk of the development time lies at the feet of the WMF, when the old solution was breaking down, the new renderer couldn't effectively handle collections and the Foundation, looking at the number of people who were using the books-to-PDF solution, couldn't justify taking people away from other projects to work on it.
c. I suspect you vastly overestimate the long-term financial viability of discouraging the use of collections if one's business model is printing collections of articles. The typical reaction to not being able to generate a PDF in the way one had hoped is to not generate the PDF. Printing a book is rarely a reasonable alternative to downloading a PDF. PediaPress stepped in because they want this to work.
d. The developers have to do other work that's actually putting food on the table.
TL;DR: This isn't a scam, it's the result of WMF prioritising working on more widely used functions leaving this to volunteer developers related to PediaPress.
