My wife's previous job was as an accountant with the endowment foundation at a mid-sized public university (San Jose State University). A lot of her time was spent making sure that the spending from the endowments many different funds corresponded to the rules that the donors had given when donating that money. Much of that was working with groups to shift spending around between accounts when they invariably made "mistakes".
One of her biggest projects was shepherding a large group of very old donations through a legal process to remove provisions in the donation agreements that were now illegal. In these cases the donors were long deceased, and the most common rule that needed to be changed was targeting race or ethnicity (e.g.: funds setup to help black people, or Irish, etc...).
The sheer number of different variations on "donor intent", or even just the wording on that legal document was astounding. There was always a tension between my wife's group and the group that was bringing in the money ("stewardship"), her group wanted things to be simpler and the "stewarding" group wanted nothing to get in the way of donations. It was remarkably similar to the tensions between sales and engineering in many software firms.
Hello! PSF staffer/author of the linked post here. To be explicit, the Anthropic donation is actually "no strings attached," or in non-profit parlance "unrestricted," but with a handshake agreement that they hope to improve security with this sponsorship. So the gift will enable us to do security work we've wanted to do and it is our intention to do that, but Anthropic didn't formally earmark the money, which gives us a great deal more flexibility plus a lower accounting burden, and I'm personally very grateful for that.
Of course you can. The vast majority of donations of this magnitude come with strings attached, be it how the money is spent, access to leadership/events, etc
It's super common with non-profits. Obviously they would prefer no strings attached but some light strings are usually not a problem for most non-profits.
And they come in a variety of bindingness. I didn’t notice any details in this link which makes me think this is mostly a handshake deal, but it wouldn’t be at all unusual for there to be some auditing mechanisms on a quarterly/yearly cycle.
For example, Wikimedia just recently claimed that they can’t chase some political project that critics wanted them to because most of their funds are earmarked-for/invested-in specific projects. So it does happen with US-based tech non-profits to at least some extent.
The vast majority of donations to, say, universities are made with a specific purpose, and that happens with a lot of non-profits too. The recipient doesn't have to accept the donation, of course, but if they do they track exactly how it was spent.
When the Yahoo news website was not responding, my reflex was to do a traceroute. The last hop was not resolving, and it was arriving Somewhere in NY. Guess what, they were hosted in the tower. It took a while to get redirected to the West coast.
I'm curious what you think the correct response to defamation is? At multiple opportunities (including the morning of the trial) Roy and Rianne were given the option of just removing the defamatory material and apologising and having the case dropped without having to pay anything. This is in no way my preferred outcome.
I'd have been entirely happy with that outcome, and I sent Roy and Rianne emails asking for that before getting lawyers involved. Even then, the initial request was just for correction - we offered to settle several times after the case started, and Roy documented his refusal in https://techrights.org/n/2025/11/04/We_Turned_Down_Every_Set... . As I said, these efforts continued until the morning of the trial, when I explicitly told my lawyers to make an offer that would involve Roy and Rianne paying nothing.
The way English court costs work is that if someone offers a settlement that would be more favourable than the court eventually orders (ie, the defendant could have settled for less than the damages the court orders, or the claimant could have settled for more than the damages the court orders) and that settlement is refused, then additional damages and costs are due as a consequence of refusing the early settlement offer and costing everyone more money. But for this to work, the court cannot be told about the settlement offer until afterwards - otherwise the judge could be influenced. As a result, there won't be any discussion of settlement offers in the judgement.
(This does have an unfortunate consequence - a defendant who wants to keep a case out of court can make a settlement offer that's higher than the court is likely to offer, and if the claimant refuses then the entire exercise ends up being much more expensive)
Git was supposed to be "distributed", but we ended up with a central HTTP hub.
Can't we switch to something more advanced in terms of protocols (like one that always maintain 3 copies, and where people can give ressources (cpu/bandwidth/memory) in the forms of tokens)?
"effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture"
Give me an example where Antitrust was actually breaking any monopoly.
In the EU and the Microsoft antitrust case, the remedy was to give the best poison to the competitors (free software Samba in that case) in that case royalties over patents.
Antitrust don't work, fines are too low, remedies are not working, and the administration is biased and politicized.
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