[WikiEN-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[Geoffrey Plourde]

Google is not a nonprofit. We attract people who are altruistic in nature, they have no intereest in making wealth for some corporation. After we decided what qualified as a stockholder, it is likely that we would become a public corporation in some way shape or form.



----- Original Message ----
From: Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 9:45:37 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

On 11/03/2008, Geoffrey Plourde <geo.plrd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I can think of several reasons why the Foundation remains a non profit. If we switched to a Corporation, this would;
>
>  1) Remove tax deductible status (Think taxation, big time)
>  2) Undermine crediblity as a free compendium of knowledge
>  3) Create a big legal mess. WF would have to define stockholders which would disenfranchise several million users. In addition, these new stockholders would have a tax mess on their hands.
>  4) Open us up to SEC scrutiny
>

The GFDL means it's perfectly possible to dissolve the foundation and
sell off the servers.  Not going for a proper revenue stream because
you would actually have to pay tax on the profits sounds a bit of an
odd suggestion.

So the non-profit status of Google "undermines credibility as a free
compendium of knowledge"?  How does that work?  If I look something up
on Google Scholar or Google Books, how does this undermining happen,
how will I notice that it's happening?

Could you explain about the SEC?

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