Revolution of 2016/Free and commercial software
Commercial reuse of WMF built applications[edit]
In short, I think the WMF should collate and publicise more information about commercial re-use applications, and be transparent about the work it's doing to support such re-use. Maybe there is another "transparency gap" here.[4]
Part of our core mission as a community is free access - will a "pay for service" model for APIs for commercial re-users alienate a significant portion of the community? Does requiring some to pay while others get it free raise questions similar to those around "net neutrality"?
In many cases it may be too simplistic to simply say "a company is benefiting, so they should pay". The point is that *we* also benefit, from increased readership for example, from our work making it to end users as technology changes and as the way people get information changes. There is certainly a situation where setting too high a price would simply push commercial re-users to not use our content at all, so sensible pricing would be key. And with real serious ongoing analysis, the right price could still be "free" even if we in principle charge.
For me, despite those being real concerns, I come down firmly on the side of being careful about falling into a trap of doing lots of expensive work for commercial re-users without having them pay. I don't actually think we do a lot of that right now. What I'd like to see is more of it, and I'm pretty agnostic about whether that's in the form of "self-financing cottage industries" or a "separate for-profit arm" or within the current engineering organization. I can see arguments for any of those.
The question is about impact for your bucks. If it requires a relatively small investment from WMF for Wikimedia content to be spread among more people, to reach a wider audience, and if that cost somehow prohibits those commercial players to do it in an open way or with other hurdles that hinder further distribution - why not!
If a tech task is relatively cheap and will expand the spread of free knowledge then no one would object to you spending a little bit of donor money, I'm sure. But don't you see a point where it becomes sensible to expect the for-profit/s who are expanding their profits thanks to such work to pay for such work? Especially when we have a limited budget, and volunteers' requests for you to help them make and present knowledge are routinely turned down?
As far as I know, Wikipedia lookups via Apple's Siri and Amazon Kindle's lookup widget are handled 100% by Apple and Amazon respectively. They get our data (presumably through our open data dumps), censor it, index it, and write and maintain their own search and snippet display services.
Amazon is using our APIs and/or dumps. There's little to add to Brion's explanation of how this works, so I'd suggest you re-read it.
To the best of my knowledge, that refers to exactly what Brion suggested it might, specifically working on the Android app so that it's compatible with more platforms. It has nothing to do with the Wikipedia lookup functionality on the Kindle.