[Foundation-l] Britannica became free

[David Gerard]

2008/12/22 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:

> Then, I wanted to see what is the value of Britannica; without
> success. It is a "private company" (in US sense of that meaning;
> "public companies" in European sense are just companies owned by some
> local or state government; and in some specific circumstances). It is
> owned by Jacqui Safra, a billionaire [citation needed] [1], who may be
> an interesting partner to WMF. So, if it is not possible to buy it, I
> think that it is possible to make some deal to work together.


I don't know. He appears to have bought it to keep it going, as a
valuable entity in itself.

So maybe what we need to do is talk to him about Wikipedia ;-D


> And I think that it shouldn't be just about Britannica. There are a
> lot of high quality encyclopedias all over the world. WMF may think
> about some kind of cooperation with them. It is not possible anymore
> to have encyclopedia as a profitable company, so I think that the
> institutions which own encyclopedias will be more open for
> cooperation; including giving the content under the same license(s) as
> under Wikipedia content is.


Britannica is notoriously antagonistic toward Wikipedia in its
advertising, but Brockhaus for instance isn't anywhere near as
obnoxious (they're not *fans* of Wikipedia, but they have more class
than to trash a perceived competitor the way Britannica try to). What
other important language encyclopedias of comparable renown are there?


- d.