On 10/25/07, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I had an interesting discussion this evening with a senior sales executive for a major commercial publisher, who was totally amazed that we did not accept advertisements, as in his view everyone wanted to maximize income and financial support and the money the staff could be paid--as his company did.
That's sort of the point, even with regard to the subject of this thread.
Wikipedia is fundamentally an altruistic venture, more so than Mozilla is. Mozilla doesn't state amongst its goals bringing a browser to poor kids in Africa. It's just a free browser because people want a free browser for themselves. Wikipedia is a free encyclopaedia because people thought *other people* should have a free encyclopaedia.
This clarifies for me why it's ok that Wikipedia is struggling along without advertising. OTOH, it would be a good thing in my view if MediaWiki could be separated from Wikipedia, so that MediaWiki could get serious dollars for serious development. The altruistic imperative is much less strong for the software than it is for the content.
Steve