On 05/10/2010 03:11 AM, Tim Starling wrote: > On 10/05/10 15:25, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva wrote: > >> BTW, I also have a broader question. Who entrusted power to the Board >> of Trustees? >> > Jimmy Wales determined the structure of the Wikimedia Foundation when > he created it. He and Bomis donated the relevant assets, such as the > domain names, to the Foundation at the time it was formed. > > We should remember, when we criticise his use of whatever remnant of > power that he has left, that he could have easily structured Wikimedia > as a for-profit entity, with him retaining majority control. We have > Jimmy to thank for Wikimedia's non-profit status, its open-source > software stack and its free content license. >
That isn't really true, though. He recruited volunteers with the promise of the free-content license for sure, and with a sort of implicit promise of a generally free-culture / volunteer-run encyclopedia. If he had *not* promised anything, he would have had many more troubles recruiting volunteers. You do remember that GNUpedia was gearing up to serve as a competitor, and only backed down because Jimmy gave them enough assurances that Wikipedia was such a free-culture encyclopedia that their efforts would be redundant? In short, Jimmy could not have gone the for-profit or non-free-culture route, because he would have been left more pitiful than Citizendium: a project with no contributors. -Mark _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l