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by TylerE 2524 days ago
Purism is a for-profit corporation.

You aren't donating - any more than you're "donating" to Comcast when you pay your cable bill.

5 comments

You're correct, it's not a donation. However Purism right now is important in a way Comcast is not. Their work on the software side is making the GNU/Linux phone a reality and it will help both vendors and makers a like in the future. Supporting the company is indirectly supporting the GNU/Linux phone ecosystem and may be one of the best things to throw your money at right now to push development forward.

On the Comcast side, they can get fucked. My whole city pays them a crazy high fee for internet and more a month with very little improvements being made in infrastructure. Sure they now a have a remote with voice commands, but I and most people I know are almost never near the advertised speeds. At least the latency is good.

Not quite. They are a social-purpose corporation incentivized to use their profit for public benefit. Which they are doing.

https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/

Purism is a social good corporation. It changes things a bit, but I’m unclear how
B corps are allowed to prioritize specific values enumerated in their corporate charter, even at the expense financial gains. Regular corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, which in recent decades has been interpreted as requiring companies to maximize short-term shareholder value
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi...

There is no fiduciary requirement to put profits above all else. In fact there is no fiduciary duty to make profits, just basically to do what's best for the company. There is no short term time frame listed. If there is a requirement to make profits it's not because it's a responsibility. Shareholders may want it but no one gets punished if a bad decision for the long term success of the company doesn't pan out. There's numberous examples of CEOs that attempted to pivot when it wasn't the most profitable course of events and then receiving a nice severance more than most employees make in a lifetime of work for failing.

It's almost as if the more and more you compensate your c-suite execs with your own shares, the more you would expect to see them chasing short-term profits regardless of the degradation of firm longevity...
Yes this is a common refrain.

You encourage what you measure against

Knowing what to measure against is harder the higher you go up the corporate ladder.

Incentives get skewed towards short term employees and short term rewards. Companies treating their employees as resources has only hurt loyalty. No one starts at a company in the US anymore unless they're average or below workers. The whole idea of companies not being willing to pay existing employees what they would pay a new hire is stupid too. You're willing to pay more for someone you're going to have to train and is a literal risk, versus a known commodity with known output. Generally you pay more for stability on the market not less.

Does Comcast support the Linux and "privacy" ecosystems?
Donation, no. But it’s a vote. You’re paying to vote for the type of “freedom” many of us here want to see.