Noting I am probably being trolled, but still... ;-)
On Jul 15, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 11:14:07 -0400, "Daniel R.
Tobias"
<dan(a)tobias.name> wrote:
This is an interesting line of discussion... Just
what does everybody
think is likely to be the future of Wikipedia in ten, one hundred,
one thousand, ... years?
Microsoft will buy it. You know they will - nobody is allowed to have
ay significant presence in the digital world without the Evil Empire
taking an interest.
They *can't* buy it - depending on what you mean by
"it". If you mean
having a copy of the content they can do anything (that the GFDL lets
them do) to, they already can have that, and they don't even have to
pay for it. In fact, I'm slightly surprised they haven't set up a
mirror on MSN already. If you mean the copyrights in the content, I
know a large number of contributors won't sell theirs, so that's more
or less moot, baring any joint authorship strangeness. If you mean
owning the servers - hell, if Microsoft wanted to give us use of some
servers they owned, I wouldn't refuse - but that doesn't give them much
besides a nice publicity boost. If you mean owning the trademarks
(name, logos, etc.), they'd have to go through the Foundation first.
If you mean controlling the Wikimedia Foundation, that might happen, in
which case there'd be a nasty, unpleasant split, with many contributors
pooling their cash and buying new hardware, and things would go on more
or less as they do now, except the leadership would change (and we'd
have a nasty, big wiki-iezed competitor to deal with). Sort of like
what happened with Napster. I can't think of any other meanings of
"it" - if anyone has some, please post.
They will migrate it to .Net, the number of servers
will multiply a
hundredfold, performance will suck, and all contributions will be
licensed under the MSFDL, which is sort of like GFDL except with
Microsoft owning everything.
Well, they can't switch to the MSFDL if they want
to combine it with
existing Wikipedia content, unless they can suborn the FSF - in which
case the world has ended, so we have other things to worry about... ;-)
Jesse Weinstein