The mutual interdependency of Business and the Commons
David Wiley, who just founded the open textbook company Flat World Knowledge, and is known as an open education activist, comments and quotes from an article on philanthrocapitalism by Mark Surman.
He quotes the following factoids:
“Who are the top funders of Wikipedia? Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite. Who funds the creative commons? Sun, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook as well as a number of foundations created with newly minted high-tech wealth. The commons is clearly on the philanthrocapitalist menu.”
This leads him to the following conclusion:
“Everyone loves the peer-production model of Wikipedia and its sister projects, which are generally held up as a model of purity, set apart from business models that involve “money.” But it shouldn’t surprise you at all to see that the “Costs of providing the Organization’s various projects” were over $2,000,000 USD for fiscal 2006-2007, including the $400k they spent on hosting (Wikimedia Financials). $2,000,000 is serious cash… Just showing that the more successful an open project is, the more it will cost to host manage and run ($2M/year for Wikipedia, the project ‘run entirely by volunteers’), and the more critical a partnership with the business world becomes for successful open projects.
Of course, if you want to have a small-scale, low impact open project, no partnership with the business world is necessary.”
