[Foundation-l] what do we do in the event the Foundation fails? - Re: Pol...

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2007/4/19, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com>:
> On 4/19/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> >
> > The assets are not the content. They are the servers, the logos, the
> > trademarks, and the name. That would be lost. That is what people  recognize.
>
> Allow me to strongly disagree. The financial assets are the trademarks
> and the name. Technical assets are the servers. But all of these are
> worth nothing if there is no content, and more important, no
> volunteers to continue carrying out the work.
>
> Not to mention that in the evenutality we're talking about, ie. the
> Foundation is sued, those assets you are mentionning would be... moot.
>

I think that "black" option could be similar with what happened to
DMOZ. DMOZ was sold and bought several times, and their main asset was
in fact not the brandame, logos, servers etc. but both a structurized
data and structurized community.  Although it was sold several times,
their community was not very affected by these changes, as all the
companies who holded DMOZ were clever enough not to "kill the chicken
producing golden eggs", ie. they did not destroy the community's
integrity by forcing new policy, which might be rejected by majority
of the community's members. Logos, brandnames, servers are just a
tools, not the main value of the Wikimedia projects.

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html