[Wikimedia-l] FreeBSD fate and the lesson for Wikimedia movement

[Milos Rancic]

The news from today is that FreeBSD didn't succeed to gather enough
money during their annual fundraising [1][2].

Badass suggestion would be that they should ask now Apple for funds.
But, I'll try to keep chortle for myself and remain serious for the
rest of this email.

First of all, FreeBSD is a part of our broader movement and Wikimedia
Foundation and Wikimedia chapters should find a way how to help them.
I suppose that Mozilla Foundation could be also interested in this
venture. Thus, I'd ask WMF and relevant chapters (those who have
money) to organize themselves, contact Mozilla and see how to help
FreeBSD community. I know that it's not a straight-forward action, but
it's manageable.

If necessary, you can send email to me and I'll connect all interested
Wikimedia [and surrounding] organizations. (And, please, don't ask me
"Why should we help them?".)

Second, and more important for ourselves: this is very strong message
to us. Obviously, that's not because our content isn't licensed under
a copyleft license.

While I could appreciate FreeBSD folk's ethical position that free
content should be free without any limit; while I could tolerate their
flirt with proprietary software vendors; it proved that their strategy
is bad for themselves. In short, they rely on their usefulness without
having any defense.

The question of [the type of] content license was the question of
1990s and early 2000s. Wikipedia solved that issue at the very
beginning of its existence.

But, strategic flaws are not limited on choosing the license. There
are many of them and every new epoch brings their own possibilities to
make them.

I can see that we are in similar position now as FreeBSD was during
the late 1990s. Good news is that it's likely that we have ~15 more
years to change things. Bad news is that we are already at least five
years behind our competition.

And our competition are not various online encyclopedias -- not one as
large and as relevant as Wikipedia. Our competition are top Internet
sites, which are taking away the attention of our users.

Fortunately, no top Internet site has enough of imagination to create
viable collaborative educational project of Wikipedia size. (BTW, they
have courage to do that -- Google Knol was the best try. Fortunately.)
Fortunately, we don't have serious competitor outside of our broader
movement (we don't have it inside, neither, but that wouldn't be so
bad news; actually, bad news is that we don't have internal competitor
yet).

Unfortunately, although existing, our steps toward making Wikimedia
projects more attractive to new generations are so small, that it's
hard to see them.

I am happy to see that we finally got two new projects: Wikidata and
Wikivoyage. That's, for sure, the step in the right direction and the
first fresh blood after six years.

However, our fate won't be much different from FreeBSD's if our main
strategies are to repeat the pattern (Wikivoyage) or to do some really
cool things for very limited population (including myself, of course;
I am really excited with Wikidata).

Our strategy should be contemporary. And, yes, that means social
networking and gaming features. And, no, they don't have to be dumb.

[1] http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/12/09/1726222/freebsd-project-falls-short-of-year-end-funding-target-by-nearly-50
[2] http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/