[Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales in the news

Sat Mar 8 03:59:15 UTC 2008

SlimVirgin wrote:
> On 3/7/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> If could have been kept as a for-profit but run as if it were a
>>  non-profit and would probably do almost as well as it has done, and
>>  then once it gets big enough, start milking it for all it's worth.
>>  Some people would have avoided working on it if it wasn't owned by a
>>  registered charity, but probably not many. The content is free
>>  regardless of who owns the site, and I think that's what matters to
>>  most people, as long as someone isn't actively exploiting their work.
>>     
> I agree. I had no idea when I started who owned what, and I didn't
> care. The social and moral value of the project exists independently
> of the money angle. And if it had been run with almost all the profits
> going to good causes, it would still have been a very attractive
> project to volunteer for.
>   
In my personal experience of discovering Wikipedia, the most important 
consideration initially was not so much whether it was possible for 
someone to make money - after all, anybody can try to make money 
redistributing our projects - but whether I still retained the essential 
rights to my work. So it was the licensing more than the non-profit that 
clinched it for me. I would not have contributed regularly to a site 
with terms of service that required me to, say, assign copyright to the 
site owner.

But if I was at most very vaguely aware of the corporate entity at 
first, it does matter a lot in the long run. I would not have stayed on 
the project with any tenacity if Wikimedia was a for-profit business.

--Michael Snow