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Would you turn down millions of dollars in no-strings-attached donations if you were running a charity? What was the negative result of those donations that yo
by Taywee 4y ago
Would you turn down millions of dollars in no-strings-attached donations if you were running a charity? What was the negative result of those donations that you can point to?
I'm not a fan of Google or Facebook, but I also don't outright boycott everything that they've ever touched. They donate money and developer time to tons of projects that I use regularly (including Linux), and it would be hypocritical of me to look down on the EFF for benefiting from the companies that I also benefit from.
I don't like the bad behavior from Google or Facebook, but I don't think donating millions to the EFF is bad behavior, nor do I think getting tens of thousands of pull requests merged into public FOSS projects from Google and Facebook employees is bad behavior. Black and white guilt-by-association doesn't work when you have companies of this size, with hundreds of thousands of employees, and tons of varying internal cultures.
- user3939382 4y agoIt’s not bad from Google or Facebook’s perspective, it’s bad for the EFF. Accepting money from the organizations you’re supposed to be monitoring is a conflict of interest. You shouldn’t have to question whether that money affected their behavior towards those organizations and now you do. They should not have accepted it, arguably they didn’t need to.