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BomisBomis (pronounced to rhyme with "Thomas") is a dot-com company founded in 1996. Its primary business is the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and it also sells erotic images over the Internet. The majority owner of Bomis is Jimbo Wales, and it has never had venture capital. Minority stakeholders include Tim Shell and one silent partner. Bomis is most notable for founding the online encyclopedia project Nupedia, and hiring Larry Sanger to manage it. During the early stages of this project, Sanger had the idea for Wikipedia, which was originally intended as a sub-project and drafting platform for the more formally organised Nupedia. However, Wikipedia, with its much lower barrier to entry, rapidly outgrew its "parent", and soon became far larger than the main business of Bomis itself. For a while, Bomis not only provided web servers and bandwidth for these projects, but owned some key items such as the associated domain names. However, when the Wikipedia community ruled out advertising as a means of paying for these resources - and in order to reflect the spirit of openness and neutrality central to Wikipedia - it was decided that new arrangements were needed. The Wikimedia Foundation was formally announced on June 20, 2003, and all related assets (both in terms of intellectual property and computer hardware) were transferred or donated to this non-profit organisation. (See: By-laws of the Wikimedia Foundation (PDF file)). Larry Sanger had by this time left the project - since it made no profit with which to pay his wages - but Jimbo Wales retains a key role on the board of the Foundation, along with users elected from the Wikipedia community. The Foundation now funds the operation of Wikipedia (and its sister projects) through donations from various sources. Jimbo Wales has since started several other wiki-based projects, affiliated to neither Bomis nor Wikimedia. External links
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