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Built a massive software effort (Wikimedia) based on volunteers that is open and keeps him decently comfortable in a nice city (London), but little more.

He's led the effort in a way that has enabled to project to stick to the core values.



Some people would criticize the fact that Wikipedia survives on volunteers as exploitation.


If it is, it's one of the far milder cases. How many successful projects these days are based on volunteer labor? Think of how much money Android has made Google over the years.

Wales keeps himself basically comfortable. He's upper-middle class at best. Compare that to Pichai's $10 million in total compensation last year, which is roughly ten times the lifetime earnings of the average American. Wales is closer to the pay of his volunteers than he is to Pichai, by several orders of magnitude.

Most people are willing to volunteer for organizations or efforts where the people leading the effort are paid a cash salary. It's when people get generational wealth off of the charity of others that it becomes offensive, at least to most people.


Those people better not be supporters of be open-core software projects that "exploit" volunteer contributors, or they'd be hypocrites.


Hypocritical or not, that isn't really an argument against Wikipedia surviving on unpaid labor and saying that that is the model to pursue.


I think it's pertinent to the context of this thread, re: MinIO as an open-core project that accepts unpaid labor.


Which clearly isn't working for them since they are making this change.


It's not the "unpaid volunteer labor" aspect they have a problem with, since that's not changing.




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