[Foundation-l] This is not an Advertisement @ pgunn

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 1/2/07, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am not leaving because my help is needed and I have a 1,000,000,000-year
> contract to serve, but you really need to reconsider ways of getting
> cash-money that don't involve pissing off the entire community. Not to
> mention, that was real shit communication on your part, Wikimedia.

A (few) dozen people is not our entire community.

I understand your desire to keep your friends happy, but of the people
who've left over this who speak languages that I understand, I'm not
seeing too much in the way of real objections to the advertising
within the context of the goals of our project. Instead I see some
confusion about what Wikimedia is actually about.  Brion's post really
spoke clearly about this sort of confusion.

For example, in the thread here we see Pat Gunn saying his farewell.
We don't see Pat going into why the things that have happened harm
Wikimedia...

The reason for this is that there isn't any harm that most of the
people listening here understand. You see, it's Pat's position that it
is not sufficient that Wikimedia be non-commercial; he believes that
it must be actively anti-commercial.

His position on commercial activity isn't surprising considering his
political alignment (he's a communist), nor do I think he's incorrect
for holding it, but I do think he is incorrect for expecting Wikimedia
to act against its primary objectives just to further the distantly
related political objectives of some of its participants.

There are a great many ideas out there, but it's nearly impossible to
build a productive organization around more than a tiny number of them
at once.

Wikimedia is about [[Free content]] for education, and increasing the
amount of knowledge available to the world.

Wikimedia is not about destroying the military industrial complex, or
putting Rupert Murdoc out of business... even though people who
advocate such things may consider the success of Wikipedia a necessary
part of achieving their goals.

People of many goals (including anti-commercialism as well as pure
unbridled capitalism) can often find common objectives with our own,
and when they do I sincerely hope that we can work with them to
further our own goals. It is important, however, to remember that just
because we share goals with differently-motivated parties, those goals
are not necessarily the goals of Wikimedia.  Our ability to cooperate
with as many people as possible depends on Wikimedia maintaining a
consistent and clear focus.

So while I am saddened to see people go, I also see it as a sign of
*decreasing* confusion. It is my belief that such departures were
always inevitable.. We could not prevent the loss even by accepting an
a dramatic shift in our mission, Just as we're losing Pat because
Wikimedia isn't anti-commercial... or we'd lose someone else (and
perhaps many more) if we were to make Wikimedia actively
anti-commercial.

In the past when I've had people threaten to leave because I argued
that we shouldn't accept their preferred free-as-in-no-lawsuit-yet
content, I've offered to help with some of the technical aspects of
setting up a fork around their rejected ideals. So far no one has
taken me up on this.  If any of the folks leaving because they are
disappointed that Wikimedia can't and won't adopt their political
agenda would like to start a fork, feel free to ask for my help.  Of
course, forks are bad... but when people refuse to cooperate towards a
single superordnate goal
(http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SuperordinateGoal) our choices
are fairly limited.