[Foundation-l] Statement to the Associated Press

[Delirium]

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Luckily, however, since the price tag for servers doesn't come 
> with a specificiation of how much went to "random dinners", we're 
> never going to find out.  Less information for us saves us from 
> being upset.  We might avoid IBM if they were using slave labour, 
> but generally one doesn't buy servers based on management dinners.  
> Instead the prudent organization bids for tenders from several 
> manufacturers and picks the best offer, regardless of the methods 
> and costs each manufacturer might have.
>
> Similarly, the prudent donor should ask which free content charity 
> produces the best result for donated money.  Could the Wikimedia 
> Foundation have done better?  Are there any stars that shine 
> brighter in the cyber sky?
>   

These are somewhat different cases, though. In the server case, at the 
end of the day if you need a server, you're going to buy it from 
someone. If all options seem wasteful, you'll take the least wasteful 
one. IBM doesn't have to make you think they're great, only that they're 
better than everyone else. But nobody has a hard requirement to donate 
to a free content charity, so simply being the best free content charity 
is not going to automatically get us anybody's money. We have to go the 
added step and convince them that an incremental addition of money will 
be spent, at least mainly, on directly furthering something that they 
care about, rather than what they would see as wasteful (or even 
legitimate overhead, too much of which turns people off when it comes to 
charities). If, on the other hand, they perceive that a decrease in our 
funding by, say, $100k, will result in us just trimming some fat and no 
harm to our actual mission, then they'll withhold the donations.

-Mark