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Open, collaborative resources and being commercial aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Fundamentally, open content isn't that different from open source, an
by jpatokal 14y ago
Open, collaborative resources and being commercial aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Fundamentally, open content isn't that different from open source, and while it's not easy to monetize free things without being evil, it's certainly possible: see eg. Red Hat. And WikiHow (http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page) is a great example of how you can run a for-profit wiki without selling out to the dark side, see eg. their About page: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:About-wikiHow http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:About-wikiHow
But you do need a long-term perspective and a genuine rapport with the community, which is why 'traditional' companies taking over open source projects and adopting corporate command-and-conquer strategies to run them tend to crash and burn. Oracle and the trail of devastation they've wreaked with OpenOffice and MySQL is probably the canonical example, and Internet Brands is their open content equivalent.
And oh, thanks for the thanks ;)
- creamyhorror 14y agoIt's certainly possible, as you said, but it takes a philosophically aligned company to do it, and those are a rare breed indeed - very much the exception to the norm. By default I'd assume any traditional profit-oriented company that acquires an open resource to be likely to mess things up as it tries to extract revenue. (This is directed at @mmahemoff too - StackOverflow is a good counterexample, but again an exception.) I look forward to location-enabled WV guides/maps on mobile, if that ever becomes available - that would be amazingly useful. I'm often tempted to look towards tourist-oriented functionality in my own web/app project, but would like it if the market winner turned out to be an open resource rather than a crowdsourced-yet-profit-driven one. 'welcome :)