[Foundation-l] Board meeting in Rotterdam later this week

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Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>   
>> The biggest error that I see is that people with not enough knowledge 
>> about the law make the policy. 
>>
>>     
> Yes.
>   

While true, it's worth recalling the reason for the general anti-lawyer 
backlash among communities of this sort: That in normal 
corporate/foundation/business practice, when left to the legal 
department things almost never get approved because of the legal risk.  
Wikipedia as a project would never have been approved at all by any 
reasonable corporation's legal department, because the legal issues are 
far too risky to countenance.  We recklessly went ahead and started 
building it anyway, and figured we'd tackle the legal issues as they arose.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't defer to lawyers where useful and 
necessary, but the general "ecology" is one of tension between legal 
caution on the one hand and a desire to produce a useful encyclopedia on 
the other hand.

-Mark

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