Jimmy Wales Gives Talk on Free Culture, Transparency, and Se

Wikipedia, on of the top 10 sites on the Internet, currently spends roughly $25,000 a month on hosting, around $12,000 of which is bandwidth - the cost of broadcasting massive amounts of information out to the Internet is relatively low. The second initiative is "Open Serving" that they've basically just started: as long as you use free software, and license your content under a free license (cc or gnu fdl), then Wikia will host your site for free, whatever you want to do - even if what you are doing is commercial - you keep the revenue, they are giving it all away.

Admittedly, he says everyone's first reaction is that "sounds pretty crazy" and then they ask how Wikia's going to make money on this... surprisingly Jimmy said, "we don't know... but we know that even if this project became as successfull as wikipedia, and we don't host video and things like that... as long as were sticking to text and images the monthly cost is $25,000 a month... we have venture capitalists money and we'll spend all their money and hopefully we'll figure out something, but we figure if we mange to basically generate a big cultural movement here we'll find lots of ways to benefit from that". (authors note: when raising money from vc's don't try this unless of course you run one of the top 10 sites on the net)

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• transparent
• wiki
• wikipedia
• search
• jimmy
• wales
• jimmywales
• opensource
• openserving
• wikia
• library

[vaspers]

Go Jimmy Go. Wikis will change the world and open source government will destroy the political parties, all of which suck.