[Mediawiki-l] Paid Support (was Apple's Wiki Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki)

[Rob Lanphier]

On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 18:48 -0400, Brion Vibber wrote:
> [Offering paid support] may or may not require some corporate
> restructuring; can the non-profit
> operate such stuff? cf Mozilla etc.

I am not a lawyer, but I would think some of the same issues Mozilla had
would apply.  Christopher Blizzard lays it out really well in his blog:

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=19


In particular, this part:
> Under non-profit tax law there are various kinds of contributions that
> you can accept. Individual donations, corporate donations, etc. Tax
> law lays out tests to determine if you are a non-profit: certain types
> of revenue that come from various sources and are the result of
> different kinds of activities have to meet certain percentage
> requirements. We've got some relationships that create revenue that at
> some point in the future might make it difficult for us to maintain
> our non-profit status based on those tests. Those relationships have
> given us the resources to make Firefox and Thunderbird successful so
> we didn't think that it would be right to our users and our community
> to end those relationships. At the same time, our non-profit status is
> very important to us. We didn't feel it was an option to give that up
> either.

So, conceivably, Wikimedia Foundation might be able to get away with
offering support contracts, without change.  However, if the total of
those support contracts started to make up a significant component of
the revenue of the foundation, a restructuring would probably be in
order.

My understanding with the Mozilla Foundation was that they were already
getting a pile of money from Google, Nokia, and others for which there
was a little too much quid pro quo for too much of their revenue, so
they needed to act.  I'm guessing WF doesn't have that problem yet.

Personally, I've done a little MediaWiki consulting, and have been
toying with the idea of offering a standardized paid support option
myself, but I'm unsure if the market is ready for that yet.

My question for the list:  if such an option were available, would there
be customers for it?

Rob