"Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
No. We aren't '''going''' non-profit; we always have been.
In spirit, yes. In fact, yes. But in the law, Wikipedia was just a project of Bomis, Inc., a for-profit corporation.
Also there is an argument that the volunteers of Wikipedia are a collective voluntary association (in law) that while informal are still functioning as a group. The hardware might have belonged to Bomis, but the volunteers are acting independently. I think there is a strong argument to that effect, many volunteer organizations develop that way. If volunteers use the telephone to communicate the telephone company does not own their organization does it? Volunteer associations do not need any formality to exist (such as filing a corporate charter). I think it important to keep this distinction in mind as Wikimedia (which seems to be the foundation that allows Wikipedia to exist but is independent of Wikipedia in a certain way) is just a formal entity, it is not the contributions that have been made to the nexus of activity known as Wikipedia.
Incorporating Wikimedia is an administrative action which probably doesn't mean much to the general public.
I think it means a lot to a lot of people. There was significant distrust of me for a long time. For one thing, people are not willing to 'donate' money to a for-profit corporation, and with good reason.
I don't know if that is true. The people at movable type are not a non-profit operation and they are accepting "donations" via paypal, actually I run across websites every week that do this and that are usually small business operations. When I email them and ask them about it they say that since they provide their services at low cost they need to ask for donations, legally they must report these donations as income, but if they spend the money on business expenses, then their are no taxes due (as long as the IRS accepts their business status).
Alex756