Comment by giancarlostoro
1 day ago
Just for the love of all things, do not let this become like Wikipedia or Mozilla. The moment you start paying for irrelevant things, you lose donors current and in the future. Nothing more frustrating than those two orgs in terms of where they spend their donor funds.
I am one of https://wikimediaendowment.org/benefactors (donated years ago), and now I am totally unhappy with what is happening with Wikipedia. It has been an important lesson learned.
To keep a nonprofit efficient and impactful, it is crucial for its governance to have skin in the game; otherwise, there will be no long-term alignment of interests. More details on why and how we implement this at the Open Source Endowment: https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment
As long time volunteer contributor in Mozilla (I am in the firefox credits and in the monument) it is very sad to say that I agree with you.
I have my opinion on why this is happening and my explanation is that in Mozilla they lost their memory because they act as a company and not as a foundation (they have both the identities). With the layoffs they removed a lot of people working there for years that knows a lot, they lost the historic memory and I remember a lot of discussion with employees that had no idea that there was a community or that they have no idea what is a GPL license. I mean in 2018 I remember reviewing this as part of the Mozilla Reps council, https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/open-source-archetypes that was created to help the employee to understand OSS but I think that after the managers that created moved away it was just left as it is.
Sorry for the flame but I think that when a foundation act like a corporation there are issues.
What happened with Wikipedia? I thought they run a tight optimum ship?
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