Daniel Mayer wrote:
The entire goal of this project is freedom and openness.
That is incorrect. The entire goal of this project is to create the largest, most widely-used, and best encyclopedia in the world and to give that to everybody on the planet. Everything else, and I mean *everything* (including our openness and the community itself), is a means to *that* end. Nothing more.
I strongly disagree with that---that may be your goal (and perhaps Jimbo's), but a goal of a lot of people here is to create a Free (as in Freedom) encyclopedia as the primary end. The fact that this increases its availability is quite nice, but the Freedom aspect is not merely a means to the end of increasing availability, but the end itself. For me at least, and I suspect at least some number of other people, this is the *only* end---to produce a completely Free encyclopedia, which everyone is then free to use as they wish, save that they may not restrict others' right to do the same with their derived works. This then allows any third party to fulfill whatever end they have in mind, including disseminating it to every person on earth, editing it into other works, producing WikiReaders, producing travel guides, using it as source material for literary works, or whatever else.
Were this not true, there would be a rival Gnupedia that many of us would be working on instead---The Gnupedia proposal was withdrawn only because Wikipedia serves this goal already.
-Mark