Google is not a nonprofit. We attract people who are altruistic in nature, they have no intereest in making wealth for some corporation. After we decided what qualified as a stockholder, it is likely that we would become a public corporation in some way shape or form.
----- Original Message ---- From: Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 9:45:37 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia
On 11/03/2008, Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote:
I can think of several reasons why the Foundation remains a non profit. If we switched to a Corporation, this would;
- Remove tax deductible status (Think taxation, big time)
- Undermine crediblity as a free compendium of knowledge
- Create a big legal mess. WF would have to define stockholders which would disenfranchise several million users. In addition, these new stockholders would have a tax mess on their hands.
- Open us up to SEC scrutiny
The GFDL means it's perfectly possible to dissolve the foundation and sell off the servers. Not going for a proper revenue stream because you would actually have to pay tax on the profits sounds a bit of an odd suggestion.
So the non-profit status of Google "undermines credibility as a free compendium of knowledge"? How does that work? If I look something up on Google Scholar or Google Books, how does this undermining happen, how will I notice that it's happening?
Could you explain about the SEC?
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