Baldur BjarnasonOne of the things that the Stack Overflow brouhaha demonstrates is that it doesn’t matter if a service was founded by people trusted by the community (Atwood and Spolsky) and was broadly community-led. If it’s a VC-funded startup, they will sell out their users at some point.
Howard Chu @ Symas@baldur "VC-funded startup" isn't even the only factor - plenty of cool projects started out with no VC funding, but then got acquired later in their life by private equity types. A clean start is no guarantee.