[Foundation-l] Britannica

Mon Jun 9 14:41:48 UTC 2008

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 1:05 PM, effe iets anders
<effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hm, what exactly are our relations with Microsoft then? :) We are not
> in a fight with them either, are we? Also Encarta for instance would
> be an interesting partner imho (If only because they know a lot about
> distribution), although again the big quetsion is whether *they* are
> willing for a cooperation of course (and to have any result of that
> under a free license)
>
> 2008/6/9 Przykuta <przykuta at o2.pl>:
>> It is not a heresy Milos. It is a good idea, even if they don't want free licenses, they have a big experience. We don't fight with Britannica, but we make the Internet, not suck :) Our relations with Britannica are not similar to relations between Microsoft and FSW, not in all aspects. In Poland we think about talking/meeting with PWN - we want it, they... I don't know.

Encarta is not the main Microsoft's business, so some secondary
reasons may be crucial in their decision to go or not to go to the
free knowledge. And because of that I didn't think about them.

But, for Britannica this is a very important question. At the era of
Internet [and Wikipedia] the most of people are not willing to spend
more money on their books or CDs or DVDs. So, they need to find some
other business model. Which means that they may to try to copy free
software based business model of big corporations, like IBM is. And we
are the free knowledge partner.