Noting I am probably being trolled, but still... ;-) On Jul 15, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 11:14:07 -0400, "Daniel R. Tobias" dan@tobias.name wrote:
This is an interesting line of discussion... Just what does everybody think is likely to be the future of Wikipedia in ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... years?
Microsoft will buy it. You know they will - nobody is allowed to have ay significant presence in the digital world without the Evil Empire taking an interest.
They *can't* buy it - depending on what you mean by "it". If you mean having a copy of the content they can do anything (that the GFDL lets them do) to, they already can have that, and they don't even have to pay for it. In fact, I'm slightly surprised they haven't set up a mirror on MSN already. If you mean the copyrights in the content, I know a large number of contributors won't sell theirs, so that's more or less moot, baring any joint authorship strangeness. If you mean owning the servers - hell, if Microsoft wanted to give us use of some servers they owned, I wouldn't refuse - but that doesn't give them much besides a nice publicity boost. If you mean owning the trademarks (name, logos, etc.), they'd have to go through the Foundation first. If you mean controlling the Wikimedia Foundation, that might happen, in which case there'd be a nasty, unpleasant split, with many contributors pooling their cash and buying new hardware, and things would go on more or less as they do now, except the leadership would change (and we'd have a nasty, big wiki-iezed competitor to deal with). Sort of like what happened with Napster. I can't think of any other meanings of "it" - if anyone has some, please post.
They will migrate it to .Net, the number of servers will multiply a hundredfold, performance will suck, and all contributions will be licensed under the MSFDL, which is sort of like GFDL except with Microsoft owning everything.
Well, they can't switch to the MSFDL if they want to combine it with existing Wikipedia content, unless they can suborn the FSF - in which case the world has ended, so we have other things to worry about... ;-)
Jesse Weinstein