[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Robert S. Horning]

On 11/15/2010 06:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
> I'm sure the amount of money the Foundation receives from its cut of
> actually published books is negligible - probably a few hundred dollars
> a year. I'm more interested in your insinuation that PediaPress bought
> their partnership status. Since you managed to avoid answering either of
> my questions, I'll assume you have no evidence for these aspersions.
>
> Ryan Kaldari
>    

I'm not sure what you are expecting me to say here.  I'm not really 
trying to be evasive, and I'm not sure if PediaPress made a business 
case to those WMF board members that were involved in the decision as to 
how much money that the WMF would likely get from the relationship.  If 
money was promised, that was it so far as a promise of potential 
donation in the future.  I would imagine that almost any non-profit 
organization would do that at some time or another with any potential donor.

It seems like you are expecting some major scandal to break out where 
people are trying to be subversive and evil.  The fact is that most of 
the time we are all merely muddling along doing what we think is the 
right thing to do given the facts and the information available to us at 
the time.  I understand why the decision was made, but I'm also saying 
that from my perspective I wasn't too happy about it either for my own 
reasons.  And I was in contact with at least a couple WMF board members 
at the time independently of Foundation-l.  Nothing substantial 
(obviously, nothing happened), but I did express some concerns and some 
options.

If there is a complaint, it is merely that other options could have been 
set up for physically printing Wikimedia content at the time, and still 
can if there are some wishing to make it so.  Unfortunately that 
"somebody else" doesn't seem to want to happen either and I'm not 
independently wealthy enough at the moment to be able to do this 
completely on my own dime either without being a part of a larger 
group.  It takes money to do this, and PediaPress had the money at the 
time when it mattered.  Good for them, I suppose.  That is also perhaps 
why other groups aren't necessarily busting down the door to the WMF to 
do something similar.  It would be a speculative investment that would 
by definition already have built-in competitors.

-- Robert Horning
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