Correction: So long as basic principles like not showing third party adverts are not violated there is no reason to suspect that the readership of the projects and thus the amount that can be collected from donations will *not*continue to grow.
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
I guess nobody cares if you top post or bottom post here, but it does get confusing when the two are mixed in the same thread.
I need not imply that the WMF depends on money. It's kind of obvious, isn't it? The WMF relies primarily on donations from individuals, and to a lesser extent on large grants from folks like Omidyar. So long as basic principles like not showing third party adverts are not violated there is no reason to suspect that the readership of the projects and thus the amount that can be collected from donations will continue to grow. If individual donations did decline for some reason WMF would be forced to scale back operations. There is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from extremely wealthy private interests. In the extreme of things we might find that there is only enough money to pay for servers and bandwidth. That wouldn't be so bad - it's the way things used to be. Overall I would say there is little to nothing wrong with the current situation, so I really don't understand your e-mail. Our "economical autonomy" derives from our principles of openness and freedom.
- Brian
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
Are you saying that WMF has put itself in a huge dependence relationship with money? That it could be forced to require third parties' help if the donations are insufficient? That would be throwing itself into the lion's den. What was worth risking so much its economical autonomy and mission? I hope you're wrong about the situation, Brian.
On 31/12/2010 16:19, Brian J Mingus wrote:
Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they
not
try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you
should
start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't
get
hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.
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