I strongly suspect I'm being trolled, so I won't waste too much of my time responding to this, but if you think that Mike's salary is extravagant, what is your alternative proposal? What's a fair remuneration, in your eyes, for a legal counsel or CFO? Should they give their services (full time) to the foundation on a volunteer basis? It would be lovely if we lived in some post-scarcity world where this was possible, or where a legal expert on the staff was not required, but for now the reality is that to attract talent you have to offer competitive remuneration. As has being pointed out, Mike has been working for less than what a just-graduated attorney could expect to make in a law firm; he's been extremely generous to WMF and the community by giving his time to them at the salary that he has. If Mike and the other WMF senior staff were interested in profiteering, they could do so far more quickly and easily by going and working for a big city law or accounting firm.

Cheers, Craig Franklin

Thank you everybody for explaining your views. Most of the US inhabitants who answered me seem to be living and believing

in a hierarchical and competitive world where the highest ranked ones- who are praised as gods - take from the lowest ones - who are just good enough to give their money and effort. As a matter of fact, their society seems

organized to maximize money and it is echoed in their opinion about how to

manage this huge collaborative effort about knowledge called Wikipedia.

This conditioned acceptance - conditioned in the sense that it seems

natural and the only imaginable solution - reflects a strong, current, ubiquitous, western, capitalist, materialist and proprietary cultural bias.

The alternatives are infinite, though. I would like to know what you think

of complementarity, creativity, liberty, conviviality, sharing, and optimizing (instead of maximizing) for example. Are they completely out of your scope, out of your hopes and wishes?

My understanding of the Social Contract of Debian that Milos mentioned [1]

is not as a legal policies but as ethical policies. I don't feel it has been properly discussed yet.