[Foundation-l] board candidacies

[Walter Vermeir]

If it comes to the point in this until now hypothetical situation that
to get a lot of money the independence of the WMF is affected by selling
a place on the board then advertisement should be reconsidered.

Myspace.com , Alexa ranking global the 7th place has made a deal with
google for advertisement for the amount of at least 900 million dollar
for 3 years. $ 900.000.000.  That is a lot.

Wikipedia is now on the 16th place. I have no idea how much money the
WMF could get form a deal with google or yahoo, even if it where a
limited amount of adds and not (to) annoying. But it can not be anything
other then a very impressive large pile of money.

The Wikimedia projects are ad free. That is fantastic. I wonder on what
ranking place the next ad free website is listed. The wikimedia websites
are probably unique in that aspect. It could have been something form a
Seince Fiction movie about a paralleluniversum where there are not ads
on the internet.

Nevertheless it is so that Wikimedia has a gold mine. The gold is not
used out of principle. Instead of living in a castle the WMF lives in
very modest house but can manage by donations of visitors. And things
are going better. There is some money in the savings account. There are
no loans to pay off. There is hope to get some new money without strings
on. (grands)  And the WMF is still independent. If very large amounts of
money could go to the WMF but by accepting so the WMF would lose part of
its independence then I believe putting pride aside and selling some ads
is much better then selling your soul.

Ofcource this is all hypothetical. There is (so far I know) no offer
from Bill Gates or similar to give a large truck load of money with a
end-user-agreement attached to it.

-- 
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
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