On 05/10/2010 03:11 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
On 10/05/10 15:25, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva
wrote:
BTW, I also have a broader question. Who
entrusted power to the Board
of Trustees?
Jimmy Wales determined the structure of the Wikimedia Foundation when
he created it. He and Bomis donated the relevant assets, such as the
domain names, to the Foundation at the time it was formed.
We should remember, when we criticise his use of whatever remnant of
power that he has left, that he could have easily structured Wikimedia
as a for-profit entity, with him retaining majority control. We have
Jimmy to thank for Wikimedia's non-profit status, its open-source
software stack and its free content license.
That isn't really true, though. He recruited volunteers with the promise
of the free-content license for sure, and with a sort of implicit
promise of a generally free-culture / volunteer-run encyclopedia. If he
had *not* promised anything, he would have had many more troubles
recruiting volunteers. You do remember that GNUpedia was gearing up to
serve as a competitor, and only backed down because Jimmy gave them
enough assurances that Wikipedia was such a free-culture encyclopedia
that their efforts would be redundant?
In short, Jimmy could not have gone the for-profit or non-free-culture
route, because he would have been left more pitiful than Citizendium: a
project with no contributors.
-Mark