Not if you are a company worth $1.6 trillion dollars.
But that $1 million dollars probably bought them a lot more in free press.
To put it into perspective, it would be like someone worth $1.6 million giving a homeless person $1, filming it, putting it on youtube and profiting off of it.
> Thanks Microsoft/Github.
Is this real?
Edit: Of course the downvotes. Not sure if employees of microsoft or people working in microsoft shops or the quality of people HN has attracted as declined.
For people saying nonsense like "A million dollars is a million dollars even if the company is worth 100 trillion dollars."...
Do you think forcing someone who makes $100 million to pay $1 million in taxes is the same as forcing someone who makes $2 million to pay $1 million in taxes? $1 million is still $1 million right? I guess the concept of proportionality is foreign to many here?
The "love" for microsoft recently is interesting. Facebook should look into buying that kind of love.
Ya but $1MM for a generic legal defense fund created and thus owned by GitHub (read: Microsoft) is pretty neutered. I’m sure their lawyers charge between $200-750/hr (pretty standard for a decent lawyer), so $1MM isn’t going to go very far. If they employ lawyers full time for this at 200-500k/yr, there won’t be many working on this team for very long.
Defending a medium complexity case against a deep picker (RIAA) will easy surpass that, and that’s just a single case.
The question is how can this be sustainable and not a trivial token?
Your metaphor is kind of silly, since it compares the EFF with the unhoused, but, playing along, it's more like someone worth 16 billion giving an unhoused person $10,000.
A million bucks is real money, EFF can do a lot of good with it. They're not going to buy a pack of chewing gum with it.
I'm old enough that I doubt anything will ever turn me around on Microsoft, it annoys me to no end that they bought Github. But by the same token, I'm big on the EFF, and I'm stoked that they scored some loot: I'll give Microsoft credit for that, but the only way I'm forgiving the company its past sins is if it liquidates the company and sets up a charitable fund for free software.
There's now a bulwark between developers and bad actors attempting to use Github and the legal framework against them. It is very probably that outside actual, valid legal justification, what the RIAA tried will never be tried again, thanks to the presence of that fund.
Not if you are a company worth $1.6 trillion dollars.
But that $1 million dollars probably bought them a lot more in free press.
To put it into perspective, it would be like someone worth $1.6 million giving a homeless person $1, filming it, putting it on youtube and profiting off of it.
> Thanks Microsoft/Github.
Is this real?
Edit: Of course the downvotes. Not sure if employees of microsoft or people working in microsoft shops or the quality of people HN has attracted as declined.
For people saying nonsense like "A million dollars is a million dollars even if the company is worth 100 trillion dollars."...
Do you think forcing someone who makes $100 million to pay $1 million in taxes is the same as forcing someone who makes $2 million to pay $1 million in taxes? $1 million is still $1 million right? I guess the concept of proportionality is foreign to many here?
The "love" for microsoft recently is interesting. Facebook should look into buying that kind of love.