As the Cardinal Flies

Also a completely justifiable response on all accounts.

As the now-posted follow-up may suggest, I am of mixed minds as to second-guessing the founders' intent. I think it's fairly clear from context that they were selling the idea for the nonprofit as slanted toward scholarship and advocacy (which is to say, they were targeting academics and lawyers rather than fans). At the same time, the AO3 code (which had been/was being developed fairly explicitly as a successor to the then-decaying code for the old Yuletide archive) was their major existing asset, and Open Doors was created specifically to enable the eventual import of said Yuletide archive to AO3.

Also drawing on that follow-up post: whether or not the founders foresaw (or could have foreseen) AO3's tremendous growth strikes me as largely irrelevant now. What I'll say is this: I suspect that whether or not they anticipated AO3's success, their primary intent was to keep the organization under fairly tight personal control rather than to create a broad-based fan-run entity. I regard that choice as short-sighted at best and selfish at worst; fandom at the time was actively looking around for alternatives to fanfiction-dot-net, and the timing was (as history shows) exactly right for the formation of a well-run fan-friendly Webspace.

Either way, though, that's water under the bridge. The way the wind's blowing just now, I think reform may in fact be possible - but I also think it will take individuals who are not fixated on punishing the sinners to make a success of that reform, and I don't think we yet know if we have that kind of talent on deck.