Hmm, sounds interesting.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: 14

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: 14The fact that Facebook gave money to OBS does not take away any of your money to donate somewhere of your choosing.

Yeah, after the wealthiest people and companies spent their billions, I'm still free to decide where to put my ten bucks. Cool.

Reminds me of the quote: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

I do not understand the point you're making. I mean, I get the point, but it's not applicable. A rich entity donated money somewhere, and that somehow makes it pointless for anyone that's not rich to donate anywhere...? You might as well just stop going to work if you can't earn the same amount of money as the richest corporations in the world with that logic.

So, the OP was Facebook donating money, and that makes you angry. It's sounding to me like you wish you could control Facebook's money yourself. Or, maybe your solution would be that nobody is allowed to earn lots of money or not allowed to donate. What is your ideal here?

3. Even if that doesn't result in those big actors contributing most of the money, it does tend to result in their taking over the charities involved. Small donations don't come with opinions about policy attached; large numbers of small donations are basically "background". But big donations very often come with quid pro quo attached; the big donors want the organization to prioritize particular things. So for instance, if you look at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, they give major donations to health initiatives in the Third World. They also have very big investments in pharmaceutical companies. So when they donate to an organization, they want the org to prioritize initiatives that will buy expensive pharmaceuticals over initiatives that will buy mosquito netting. Even if the mosquito netting would be far, far cheaper and more effective. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is also invested in various companies involved in private provision of education. Not surprisingly, it donates to and is involved in organizations that push for "charter" schools and, in general, privatization of education. So it's ratfucking the public education system in the name of charity. More generally, if you look at universities who get donations from alumni, the wealthy alumni with major donations tend to steer the priorities of the universities--they donate to business schools and chairs in economics, not to chairs in ecology or the humanities, let alone labour studies.
So if you hollow out public systems and "replace" them with charitable donations, what you get is wealthy people setting the policy approaches of the charities, and the policy approaches will favour generation of profits for the wealthy donors over actual efficient aid to needy recipients.

OK, keep in mind that just me quoting an excerpt and replying does not always mean I am countering your points.

I want to add that, on the topic of charitable donations, I don't think the government is a better (as in: good-er) distributor of funds than corporations. The government has a primary interest of self-preservation (not a bad thing in itself). Corporations do as well. The government is not a superhero. Don't let us forget how much influence corporations have on the government: I don't see them as that much different from each other.

(By government, I solely have the U.S. in mind.)

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: 14It's sounding to me like you wish you could control Facebook's money yourself. Or, maybe your solution would be that nobody is allowed to earn lots of money or not allowed to donate. What is your ideal here?

I don't know honestly, but for sure it's far from 1 % of the people controlling half of the wealth and controlling welfare by giving or not giving their donations. What's yours? You're cool with the actual situation?

I am not cool with the wealth(power) disparity situation. I am cool with donations to open-source projects and I'm also cool with tax reductions based on donations to non-profits (not applicable to the OP).

It seemed hyper-sensitive and maybe missing the point to be triggered on the 1% issue based on this donation news. That is really what I'm trying to understand -- whether I'm missing a simple and obvious connection, or if some of us are conceited.

It's really easy to point at problems and demand someone to fix them, and to rally with other people that feel the same way. It is, however, much better to try to come up with solutions. In the scope of topics we've been going over, there isn't a simple one; it is in contrast NOT really easy.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: 14

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: 14The fact that Facebook gave money to OBS does not take away any of your money to donate somewhere of your choosing.

Yeah, after the wealthiest people and companies spent their billions, I'm still free to decide where to put my ten bucks. Cool.

Reminds me of the quote: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

I do not understand the point you're making. I mean, I get the point, but it's not applicable. A rich entity donated money somewhere, and that somehow makes it pointless for anyone that's not rich to donate anywhere...? You might as well just stop going to work if you can't earn the same amount of money as the richest corporations in the world with that logic.

So, the OP was Facebook donating money, and that makes you angry. It's sounding to me like you wish you could control Facebook's money yourself. Or, maybe your solution would be that nobody is allowed to earn lots of money or not allowed to donate. What is your ideal here?

1. Dealing with major social problems via the actions of private charities is very ineffective. It simply doesn't get the job done; it tends to amount to treating cancer with 500 bandaids. It's useful to the individuals helped, compared to nothing, but it has no impact on the overall situations giving rise to individuals needing help. Public sector action is much more effective. If you want to reduce poverty, increasing taxation to fund social programs or Keynesian economic policies is far more effective than hoping people will donate some of their untaxed income to food banks.

My opinion is not to eliminate or reduce taxes on wealthy individuals or corporations. I am not saying to replace existing taxes with donations. I am saying that the ability to reduce some of your taxes via non-profit donations is a good thing.

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Makes me think of Valkyria Chronicles [External Link]. Looks promising.

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I'm mostly interested in this for the kids, so I'm also very curious about the Steam note. Besides that, it looks like it could be fun for a long time.

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Quoting: Doc AngeloSomething else that came across me while looking at the website of OBS: I really wondered that they have such a big amount of funding already. Just for the sake of numbers, I'm going to make a list and calculate the recurring donations and the one time donations over the last year. Just out of interest, and for the reasons I stated in my post above. I'm going for the minimum values for tiers with a stated minimum. Because there is no stated value for the premium tier, I'm going to extrapolate from the lower tiers. This calculation would be more accurate if we would have the exact numbers. If there is a good reason for OBS to not post the exact numbers, I'd like to know.

"Bronze Tier: These sponsors have pledged at least $250 per month to the OBS Project."
12 months * $250 * 6 sponsors = $18,000 per year

"Gold Tier: These sponsors have pledged at least $20,000 per year to the OBS Project."
2 * $20,000 = $40,000 per year

"Diamond Tier: These sponsors have pledged at least $50,000 per year to the OBS Project."
2* $50,000 = $100,000 per year

"Premiere Tier: These sponsors have gone far above and beyond with their contributions to the OBS Project"
20->50->100 is what I'm extrapolating here. That means that both Twitch and Facebook pay at least $100,000 per year. It was said that Twitch pays "a lot" more than Facebook, so I'm going for $150,000 for Twitch.
$100,000 + $150,000 = $250,000 per year

Then there is Patreon. It's a good thing that the income isn't hidden on the Patreon page, so we have an exact value. It is $1,392 right now.
12 * $1,392 = $16,704 (roughly $15,000)

There is also "Open Collective", which I didn't know before. It seems to be a website for donating money to projects. As it is with LibrePay, the software behind project itself is open source. In contrast to LibrePay, you can not use the service without paying them for the service. It isn't non-profit, either. It's a regular company in that regard. They take a whopping 10% from every payment towards OBS. That's without payment fees from other finance institutions, which come on top of that (I think that's called "stripe fee" in the US). I removed any instance already calculated above from the list of payments, so that just additional payments are included in this position. Also, all of items in the list that reflected above tiers show that assuming the minimum value for recurring tiers from above seems to be accurate.

$11,285.66 donations - $1,128.52 Open Collective fee - $471.53 payment processor fee = $9,685.58 (roughly $10,000)

  $  18,000   Bronze Tier
+ $  40,000   Gold Tier
+ $ 100,000   Diamond Tier
+ $ 250,000   Premiere Tier
+ $  15,000   Patreon
+ $  10,000   Open Collective
- $  10,000   See the edit below
--------
$ 423,000

Some things to note: I can not know of any other donations for example via PayPal or other ways. Known one time fees do not play a big role. The transfer fees were only subtracted where known, which is only the data from Open Collective.

--------------------------------------------------

I'm just going to let this sit here as it is, just numbers. If there is anything wrong with my calculations and more importantly my assumptions, then please let me know. Please, take what I have written above in the spirit I described in my former post above. This is just me taking a look at it, nothing more.

Maybe I'm going to write my thoughts about this later, but I'm going to go outside first. The weather is nice and my cats like going outside with me. Also, it is often a good idea to let some things sink in before going at it. :)

Edit: I just have gone over what I wrote earlier and realized I forgot to substract the Open Collective fees and transfer fees for corporate sponsors (the tiers), because some of those, but not all, are known via the data from Open Collective. I updated this with a single substraction in the final calculation.

So, about how many full-time developers can you pay a normal salary [External Link] while also paying for some infrastructure costs? How long can you budget your payroll based on fluctuating donations?

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: 14The fact that Facebook gave money to OBS does not take away any of your money to donate somewhere of your choosing.

Yeah, after the wealthiest people and companies spent their billions, I'm still free to decide where to put my ten bucks. Cool.

Reminds me of the quote: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

I do not understand the point you're making. I mean, I get the point, but it's not applicable. A rich entity donated money somewhere, and that somehow makes it pointless for anyone that's not rich to donate anywhere...? You might as well just stop going to work if you can't earn the same amount of money as the richest corporations in the world with that logic.

So, the OP was Facebook donating money, and that makes you angry. It's sounding to me like you wish you could control Facebook's money yourself. Or, maybe your solution would be that nobody is allowed to earn lots of money or not allowed to donate. What is your ideal here?

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Wait, Warhammer Online is still going? Gotta look into that!

EDIT: No, it's not still going. They must be continuing the support so that people can play Return of Reckoning, the private server that looks to still be alive. That's... kind of surprising, but cool to see Wine support that!

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Quoting: Rutine

Quoting: 14I think you have the wrong idea of the tax incentives for donations in the U.S. The tax system promotes donations of your choosing. This is a power to the people kind of thing.

Last time I checked, Facebook is not "the people". It's a big, very big company. So this is power to some very rich individuals and / or companies, to choose where their money goes because it's something that interests them or gives them a good image in the media or even both.

Quoting: 14The alternative is the government would choose which organizations receive that money, if any at all.

And why would that be bad? Even if I don't believe in the system "as is", the government is supposed to be representative of the people, much more than Facebook in any case.

Quoting: 14And in this case, I don't know that OBS is a non-profit, so the donations probably have nothing to do with tax incentives anyway.

I don't have the faintest idea if OBS is a non-profit, but in the end if Facebook does it, it's because they expect some kind of profit from it. I never used FB's streaming feature so I don't know if it can be related to that. But these kind of companies don't give money just because.

And to be clear: I'm glad for OBS, I would just love that FOSS could be funded in some other way.

The fact that Facebook gave money to OBS does not take away any of your money to donate somewhere of your choosing.

I'm not going to go deeper into taxes because it's just going to boil down to differences in political views.

If Facebook is using OBS and they are providing monetary support because they'd like some features implemented, I don't see the problem. If the community felt like they were neglected due to greenwashing, they have the ability to fork the project and hope most of the community follows. That is the open-source way.

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