[Search-l] transparency

[Seth Finkelstein]

>> Hehe I have to agree that it is very stealthy for something that
>> claims transparency as one of the pilars.

> On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 08:51:19PM -0600, jer wrote:
> It bothers me probably more than anyone... it's really not that  
> there's any secrets (as will be soon apparent, pretty straight- 
> forward stuff), but more-so just practicality.  All of the various  
> pieces coming together has been very chaotic, just trying to get  
> things functional and preparing for any sort of volume that may come :)
> 
> Jer

	Well, it seems obvious that some sort of funding deal got
done. My *guess* is that it involved funneling money through the
"Internet Systems Consortium". Something like, *hypothetically*,
BigMoneyMan was convinced to donate a million bucks or so to the
ISC, where the ISC would then run the search project for Wikia.
That structuring would mean the BigMoneyMan would get a tax deduction,
while Wikia would not be saddled with more venture capital obligations.
Then that supports buying many servers and for expert consulting.

	I should clarify I'm not saying that the above *hypothetical*
is necessarily a bad thing (though small search engines might claim 
it's favoritism in spirit even if permitted under the letter of the law).

	Maybe the deal will be announced Monday, "We got X dollars from Y
(via ISC), which allowed us to put Z servers into production and hire ABC".
I should stress, before Jimmy flames me for speculation, that under
the current "mushroom management", speculation is all I can do. And I
assume such a sharp businessman has taken his financial experiences
with Wikipedia (as part of a non-profit, "501(c)(3)" foundation) to heart.

	There's a large amount of tension between the fact that Wikia
is a venture capital backed start-up, and the idea of running a
transparent open-source project. Let's remember that the price of the
Grub crawler being $50K was not a secret _per se_, eventually being
disclosed in SEC documents. But due to the implications, Wikia
definitely had an incentive to keep that info hidden as long as
possible. Businesses by nature aren't transparent - that's the whole
history of the Securities and Exchange Commission in a nutshell.

-- 
Seth Finkelstein  Consulting Programmer  http://sethf.com/
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php