[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Mon Oct 16 22:00:05 UTC 2006

Roger Luethi wrote:
> Dreaming a little to the tune of $100,000,000 but with restrictions is
> hard, especially knowing that there is a real possibility that such a
> project may do more harm than good.

Well we want to make sure it will do more good than harm, to be sure.

And as soon as someone hands me $100,000,000 with no restrictions on 
what we do with it, we can do all kinds of interesting things.  We'll 
put the mania in wikimania. ;-)

> I wonder if content acquired within the restrictions you mentioned (pick
> any of the good suggestions made by others) could be used as a lever in
> some dual-licensing scheme (as used by several major open source software
> companies). As long as the content is under a free license but not in the
> public domain (e.g. GFDL or CC-BY-SA), we'd have a bargaining chip that we
> could parlay into access to other works. -- We can't do that for Wikipedia
> itself (because there is no single copyright owner), but if we owned a
> significant piece of desirable content, things might be different.

Now you're talking!  Can we explore this more?  Is there a 
sustainability model here?  Can we use $X to leverage the 
content-freedom of $10X worth of good stuff?

--Jimbo