Brion Vibber to leave WMF, ... yeah, it's official. Options

[Alison]

It looks like Brion is moving on to another company, soon. He's announced it on his blog amongst other places. While I wish him well - he's one of the good guys - I have to wonder what this is going to do for Flagged Revisions and some of the other important software updates. Knowing geeks as I do, he'll probably still work voluntarily on the sidelines - I know I would.

Anyways - I guess Jimmy's going to be hiring programmers and CTOs again soon

[Milton Roe]

It looks like Brion is moving on to another company, soon. He's announced it on his blog amongst other places. While I wish him well - he's one of the good guys - I have to wonder what this is going to do for Flagged Revisions and some of the other important software updates. Knowing geeks as I do, he'll probably still work voluntarily on the sidelines - I know I would.

Anyways - I guess Jimmy's going to be hiring programmers and CTOs again soon

Well, golly. I thought from his interviews that Jimbo coded up MediaWiki all by himself. I swear there were heroic images of him crawling though the server stacks personally, MySQL handbook in hand, to track down a bug. Think of Scotty crawling down a Jeffries Tube in the original Star Trek, to stick a magnetic probe up the antimatter stream.

Guess Brion has done as much MediaWiki coding as anybody, and is getting a bit miffed that all his efforts are going for other people's Wikiprojects that are either non-profit or run badly and low profit.

So, what's his big idea for the next internet thing? Well, he writes in the link you give:

The “big idea” driving StatusNet is rebalancing power in the modern social web — pushing data portability and open protocols to protect your autonomy from siloed proprietary services… People need the ability to control their own presence on the web instead of hoping Facebook or Twitter always treat you the way you want.

Pegging my irony-meter, as that's not that much different from how Wikipedia screws people now on BLP. Heh. Except you can't use software to protect you from WP, as the other side has cyborgized by turning innocent brains into human writer-bots, to dig up personal dirt about you. That's hard to match.

And Brion promises he'll help keep WP doing it, at least for a while. Meanwhile, his own project to help people protect their "presence" on the web. From sales organizations with a lot fewer brains working for them than WP has. Due to the fact that for-profit organizations have to PAY most or all of their people, and don't have most of the work done by volunteers....

Yeah, I know. Brion can't be accountable for what they do with his software. But somehow I don't think he's quitting in moral outrage. Unless it's moral outrage at running WP's software for 4 years and not getting a piece of the pie, because there isn't any pie...