On 11/15/2010 06:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
I'm sure the amount of money the Foundation receives from its cut of actually published books is negligible - probably a few hundred dollars a year. I'm more interested in your insinuation that PediaPress bought their partnership status. Since you managed to avoid answering either of my questions, I'll assume you have no evidence for these aspersions.
Ryan Kaldari
I'm not sure what you are expecting me to say here. I'm not really trying to be evasive, and I'm not sure if PediaPress made a business case to those WMF board members that were involved in the decision as to how much money that the WMF would likely get from the relationship. If money was promised, that was it so far as a promise of potential donation in the future. I would imagine that almost any non-profit organization would do that at some time or another with any potential donor.
It seems like you are expecting some major scandal to break out where people are trying to be subversive and evil. The fact is that most of the time we are all merely muddling along doing what we think is the right thing to do given the facts and the information available to us at the time. I understand why the decision was made, but I'm also saying that from my perspective I wasn't too happy about it either for my own reasons. And I was in contact with at least a couple WMF board members at the time independently of Foundation-l. Nothing substantial (obviously, nothing happened), but I did express some concerns and some options.
If there is a complaint, it is merely that other options could have been set up for physically printing Wikimedia content at the time, and still can if there are some wishing to make it so. Unfortunately that "somebody else" doesn't seem to want to happen either and I'm not independently wealthy enough at the moment to be able to do this completely on my own dime either without being a part of a larger group. It takes money to do this, and PediaPress had the money at the time when it mattered. Good for them, I suppose. That is also perhaps why other groups aren't necessarily busting down the door to the WMF to do something similar. It would be a speculative investment that would by definition already have built-in competitors.
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