This reminds me of a discussion I had with Piotrus along similar lines a few months back: http://prokonsul.blogspot.com/2009/06/flickr-vs-wikimedia-commons-why-flickr...
On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 4:26 PM, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
My understanding is that they don't take your photos down when you quit paying; "PRO" membership in flickr increases your upload quota, but discontinuing it has no effect on what you've already uploaded.
That's not quite true. Flickr doesn't delete your photos, but only the 200 most recent are available (either to you or to the public) unless you resume paying, and even the 200 are only available at a maximum resolution of (I think) 1024 pixels to a side.
For what it's worth, I love Flickr and happily pay my yearly fee, but I agree with Neil that Commons can and should be the go-to platform for a lot of what currently happens on Flickr, like the awesome astrometry.net project. In many cases, the value in Flickr as a platform for civic-minded projects is as much the type of community it has as the technology; Flickr is a photo playground, and a lot of its community aspects are rooted in the that playground feeling. But Commons could do a lot more to emulate some of the community-attracting features of Flickr and give users more ways to play and interact (with each other and with the photos). And for a lot of other worthwhile projects (like astrometry) just the technology would be enough, even without a more Flickr-like community.
-Sage (User:Ragesoss)