Dear wikimedians,
Some years ago, I visited Uzbekistan. I was shocked and amused to find that the largest paper note was 2.000 soʻm at that time, with a plan to start with the 5.000 paper note soon. The most used one still was the 1.000 soʻm note, that was about 35 US cents in the bank and about 20 US cents in the street markets. So, the first time we changed two 100 USD$ paper notes into soʻm we got around 800 paper notes in bunches of 100. It was quite interesting to note that people in the street went with black plastic bags full of money in order to buy at the market or get a taxi ride. Some days later, I talked to a local taxi driver and he told me that when he bought his car, he needed a small truck to carry all the paper notes to the car selling store. Of course, I took that as a joke. Then another man said that many houses have a room only for storing money, so you can buy a larger house in the future. I don't know if this was a practical joke, but that's how it was.
Yesterday we launched Wikimedia Enterprise. This e-mail is not to show my disagreement with the idea itself, but with the outcome. It seems that the purpose of Wikimedia Entrerprise is to have a large money revenue offering volunteer's time and content to the rich who are willing to pay for a better API. Believe it or not, I like to tax the rich.
We have millions of dollars in our money room, and, if everything goes as planned with Wikimedia Enterprise, we will soon need to buy a new house to have a larger room to store all those cheques, notes and assets. The room will soon look huge and plenty of money. Still, there's no plan to paint the house, arrange the sofa, solve the water leakage we have in the toilet, mow the lawn or buy a new set of pans so we can cook healthy food there. Soon, the cow will start aging and won't have more milk to sell. But yes, the money room will be huge. We will have more and more and more millions, but we will still... yes... obsolete.
Sincerely,
Galder