QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Sat 6th December 2008, 6:39am)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Fri 5th December 2008, 11:31pm)
The "community" can go and wank. Nobody is stripping Jimbo of anything unless you get the WMF board to agree. They legally control the private property which is the hardware. From thence, all power flows. End.
Jimbo asserts that his authority over the English Wikipedia does not come from the WMF, but instead flows from his role as Founder, and therefore the WMF has no authority to strip it from him. In any case, the WMF takes a "hands-off" position toward governing the projects, mainly because Jimbo has long insisted that that is the proper course to follow. Jimbo effectively controls the WMF too so it's a moot point.
The fact remains that the community could throw him out by choosing to disregard his authority, but I suspect that it appeared that that was happening Jimbo would have his Tories throw the revolting colonists into Boston Harbor.
He might attempt to, but THAT final scene would go down a bit like the end of the movie Robocop, where the corporate Board fires the bad CEO, and 5 seconds later, the corporate-controlled killer robot ED 209 blasts him out the boardroom window.
The SF police are bound to follow the CEO and board, as to who legally physically accesses the server building. And the programmers are hired and fired by the foundation, and they damn-well do what the board says. Jimbo can file all the lawsuits he likes (on his own nickel) but in the end, the board rules and will rule. (Of course, in San Francisco, the police would politely take Jimbo in yellow-gloved hand, and escort him out of the purple WMF building and maybe buy him a latte).
Founder, flounder, bounder, whatever. Jimbo is not an owner, by his own choice (to avoid taxes and maybe even screw another early Bomis investor), and in a society where the notion of "property" still exists, the Golden Rule is that: him who has the gold (or control of it) makes the rules. That's not Jimbo. In typical fashion he wants the power without any of the responsibility, but this will catch up with him eventually when the bloom wears off, as it does to everyone.