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Online community volunteers under investigation?

Posted by Hemos on from the you-must-keep-your-own-time dept.

NeoTron writes "An interesting story about AOL's "volunteers", and how some people are getting the Labor Department to investigate whether using volunteer labor by AOL is violating the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act. With coverage like this I'm just wondering if/how this could affect Slashdot and other online communities that use volunteers... "

1 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Things that make you go hmmmm... by McAlister · · Score: 5

    Well, normally, I just stay back, but this could potentially have an impact on things that we hold near and dear - OpenSource (or whatever the PC moniker is for today).

    Think about it: If the Labour department says that AOL must compensate volunteers for work that Aids their business, or performs some business function, what does that do for the non Netscape/AOL Mozilla developers? I don't think that projects like Linux would be affected in any significant way, because there is no company, but any project that has corporate sponsorship and support might be impacted by a negative verdict in this case.

    It is sad to see that people are always out to ruin something that I think that we all treasure here... The online community, doing things for "The big picture", and helping to improve and extend the technology that makes the Internet work. I, for one, hope that the Labour department decides to keep out of this, and decide that Internet related volunteering is "out of scope".

    Just my $0.02

    McAlister