Brion Vibber wrote:
Perhaps you don't remember, but before there was a
legally incorporated,
not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia and related projects were
in fact a side project operated purely at the whim of Jimmy Wales and
his for-profit company, Bomis, Inc.
While that's true from a legal perspective, it's never been the case
that the project was *completely* at the whim of Jimmy and Bomis,
because it relies mostly on volunteer labor---Bomis has never employed a
significant share of the article writers. So many things that would
have been legally permissible---like making a unilateral decision to put
in pop-up ads or making certain features subscription-only---were in
practice not possible.
(The current situation is largely similar, really. Most of the
community's impact on decisions isn't in the once-every-year-or-two
votes for representatives, but in the constant involvement and oversight.)
-Mark