[Foundation-l] Honorarium (was Re: [Found>, > This conversation had jumped back and forth ....)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/12/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't these honoraria essentially Jimmy's only
> means of income? I don't know if he draws a salary from Wikia, but I'm
> fairly sure that the company is not yet turning a profit. He works almost
> full-time publicising Wikimedia. It would seem very strange to me to deny
> him this one small token of our appreciation.

Imagine for a moment a world where demand for official Wikimedia talks
is so great that they fetch prices of upwards of $20,000 each.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have such speakers on our payroll at
that point? ;)

In any case, so long as a speakers isn't using the foundation's
trademarks, or otherwise deriving  revenue from directly from our
collected goodwill then there isn't a darn thing we could do to stop
them.  The question of "if the money should go to the foundation" in
such cases is thus immaterial.