On 4/18/07, Delphine Ménard
<notafishz(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/19/07, daniwo59(a)aol.com
<daniwo59(a)aol.com> wrote:
The assets are not the content. They are the
servers, the logos, the
trademarks, and the name. That would be lost. That is what people recognize.
Allow me to strongly disagree. The financial assets are the trademarks
and the name. Technical assets are the servers. But all of these are
worth nothing if there is no content, and more important, no
volunteers to continue carrying out the work.
Not to mention that in the evenutality we're talking about, ie. the
Foundation is sued, those assets you are mentionning would be... moot.
You can disagree all you want; you will still be wrong.
The Foundation's most valuable asset is the domain name
wikipedia.org.
That domain name alone is worth millions, possibly billions, of
dollars. All other assets owned by the Wikimedia Foundation pale in
comparison. Honestly, if you handed me the domain "wikipedia.org"
tonight, I could make myself $100 million by the end of the year by
turning it into an adfarm with no content at all. The domain would be
worthless at the end of that time, but in the meantime I would make a
ton of money.
If the Foundation is sued, even sued into oblivion, that domain name
will continue to be valuable. Its value will decline with time once
the content is stripped, but it'll still be worth a great deal of
money. It makes sense to take steps to protect it.
The content hosted by the Foundation is legally worthless.
Kelly
None of you are wrong, you are just both not looking from the same angle.
Your angle is from an editor or a reader point of view. That's the point
of view of the community.
Delphine's angle is from the Foundation point of view.
Financially speaking, the domain name is not bringing anything to the
Foundation, whilst the brand is, and will more and more in the future.
I can expect that over time, the brand will origin the majority (or at
least a significant portion) of the financial revenu of the Foundation.
Right now, most of our revenu come from donations, but this will
probably not be hugely expending.
We could get much more from big organizations.
We could get some money from grants, but asking for grants right now is
probably not a good idea because we lack of a processus to make sure the
grant related work is actually done.
Sale of tee-shirts is symbolic.
Endowement is still something to set up.
So, right now, what is left ?
Essentially selling data services (datafeed), and monetizing the brand
(as on DVD or on cell phones).
As such, the brand is in effect, of huge interest.