Re: [ox-en] Re: Business opportuities based on Free Software
- From: "Per I. Mathisen" <per fix.no>
- Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 21:18:03 +0000 (GMT)
On Mon, 29 May 2006, Christoph Reuss wrote:
Is it true that commercial third parties attract web traffic to their
site by placing a Wikipedia copy on it? Isn't this a waste of
resources?
Yes, yes, and yes.
If users prefer No ads, then why do they visit the copies _with_ ads?
Either they do google searches and stumble on those pages, or they are
part of a larger site, such as answers.com, with other content too.
And you don't seem to understand that "there's no free lunch" (except for
the rich..) -- the choice is between:
(a) having no ads but a capitalist King who skews the whole project
towards his own capitalist objectives, along with some copies with ads
whose revenues go to private deep pockets who don't contribute content.
(b) having a genuinely Free project and fund it by ad revenues (_without_
being obliged to skew the project towards advertisers' objectives!),
so the ads at least serve a useful purpose instead of private pockets.
No. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma ;-)
There is another option, which is having users donate money, hardware and
bandwidth. That is what Wikipedia is doing. The Bomis people are nowhere
rich enough to fund Wikipedia on their own. Companies such as Yahoo and
Answers.com are contributing funds and/or servers and bandwidth.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers/hardware_orders
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005
Lots of other projects get along well this way, too. I think we can safely
say that most open source projects have some kind of corporate
sponsorship, either through using services at sourceforge or some other
OSS services site, or directly by donations. Some sites, like sunsite, I
think, are government sponsored as well.
More could probably be done to obtain government sponsorship of socially
valuable projects like sourceforge to avoid relying on the whim of
corporations.
- Per
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