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Fiscal Year Close a Good Donation Time for Free Software
Matt writes "The close of the fiscal year is a great time to encourage your employer to donate to open source non-profit foundations." (Follow that link for more information and links to various foundations.) Lots of businesses that might shy away generally from software they haven't paid for are happily using Firefox at the very least, and plenty are running free software from the GNU project -- the FSF would be happy to supply some manuals.
I make modest donations to many F/OSS projects. While many of the sourceforge hosted projects have obvious donation links, some others don't. So, I've made a list of donation URLs for projects I have supported.
Here's a counter-example. Pick any organization you think this principle applies to and then open up the books - particularly pay. Most people do care if the organization they work for is paying an excessive salary to someone that does not contribute to the organization enough to warrant that salary.
So, what is missing from Milton's examples? Oversight and the fact that decision making is singular. This issue is transparent in the first example because everyone that cares about the transaction (being the singular you) is involved. The minute you have to involve other people (buying something for someone else or using someone else's money) you also have to involve them in the decision making process - which is exactly what Milton's set-up does not do and which not surprisingly leads to the problems that are set-up in his framing of the discussion.
So, let's return to opening up the books. Let's assume we are dealing with a public company, if stockholders had access to every aspect of the books, they would have one perspective on how much is being spent. Other employees would have a sense for how well this money was spent. The central problem is that the decision-makers (management in this case) generally do not have incentives to make this efficient and frequently do not have accurate assessments of value, and inviting dialogue with shareholders and employees that could improve these efficiencies is viewed as having a net negative effect because it involves giving up some of their decision making authority.
It seems to me that the problem is concentrated authority with no oversight. Since Milton assumes this scenario (which I will grant freqently occurs in the world), he looks to be spot on - as you put it. However, if you look at some of the underlying issues in his argument, it starts looking real flimsy, real fast. The real issue is about creating mechanisms for distributing authority (such as the traditional checks and balances of our own government) and providing for oversight and accountability. Simply saying Government or big organizations, don't work - says more about his model than about government.