3 ms·

You buy the assets of a non-profit (I think). Only rule is that the non-profit stakeholders can't profit from the sale.

• _delirium 16y ago
  The directors are legally required to act in the interests of the foundation's charitable mission, though, so they could only sell the assets if they deemed it to advance those interests. I could see selling non-mission-critical assets passing that bar, but I don't see any way the Wikimedia Foundation could justify jettisoning Wikipedia, its flagship project, as being in line with its mission. It'd be even more problematic in this case, because the Foundation's mission statement explicitly promises to maintain these resources "in perpetuity", which would seem to conflict with selling them to a third party: In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity. It's possible there's some legal wiggle room around that, but it would certainly seem hard to justify.