OSE Centralization

On Decentralization of OSE Work

> As far as I understand Centralization - we have a centralized wiki. But > anyone could fork it. OSE Germany > already forked OSE in some way. But tell me more what exactly the issue > and proposed solution would look like.

Well, you're building up a legacy here, but I think the contingency plan is not as good as it could be. What happens to the legacy when you proverbially get hit by a truck? (Or more relevant catch Corona, what the hell is going on in the US?!?) Git was designed such that the larger the community, the more clones (the complete version history) exist, so the project will not die if a core developer falls away. I'm aware of the wiki dump on archive.org, but there is a lot of information in external tools such as Google spreadsheets. All that will not be preserved and the dump is not automatically up-to-date.

Indeed, the wiki is centralized, so if the wiki falls away, it could in principle be re-established, but it is not as automatic as in git. Some form of decentralization could help with this. An obvious solution would be moving the development to git but that has drawbacks. Another solution would be to federate the wiki. I don't know if mediawiki supports this in any way, but someone must have thought about this. This would mean that multiple parties host the wiki and the accounts and everything is automatic synchronized and mirrorred. Another option is to move to Nextcloud which already supports federation.

Well, I don't have a good solution, but I was wondering if you were aware of the relative weakness of OSE in these aspects compared to for example Linux where each contributor has probably at least 1 complete clone of the Linux software.

I'm working a bit on a possible solution via git. I already have a prototype where I automatically generate a wiki page from some description files, BOM, and CAD files. If I find some time, I will create a demo video of this project and I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this attempt. It would work for me, but I'm not sure it would work for the OSE community. I do think it is important for the community to understand what is possible. I hope I find some time the coming days to update my log.

Pieter

MJ Sez

Yes, I think that is good.