[crazygringo]

You realize that people like retirees have parts of their savings invested in things like Apple stock?

So this is literally taking money that would otherwise go to grandma and giving it to open source.

Money that would go partially to hedge funds, sure. But money that's also partially going to grandmas.

How about you let individual shareholders themselves decide if they want to donate to open source personally, since the profit belongs to them? They can take their dividend and they can transfer it to open source. But not have Apple force them to.

I mean, I personally just don't like other people donating my things for me. And if I want to donate my money, maybe I want to donate it to something else like fighting poverty or disease?

It's awesome for a privately-owned two-person company to choose to donate to open source. It would not be cool for a publicly traded corporation to take a twelfth of the dividends I receive and send them to a charity that is not of my choosing.

[rowanG077]

Great! 55 year old+ have an average net worth of about a million dollars[1]. They can spare a few bucks for open source which they use to generate a huge pile of cash anyway.

[1] https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/finance/average-net-worth-...

[crazygringo]

First of all, why don't you take a look at the median rather than the average.

Second -- if you're 65 your savings have got to last you for the next 20-30 years. Including often expensive nursing home care. Suddenly even a million bucks... isn't that much.

So no -- in general, they can't spare an entire twelfth of an investment. But more importantly, even if they want to, it should be up to them. Not somebody deciding for them.

[Zambyte]

> But more importantly, even if they want to, it should be up to them. Not somebody deciding for them.

They can decide to move their money out of Apple whenever they like...?

[crazygringo]

No they couldn't.

Because the moment Apple announced that they were going to implement a policy like that, the value of the stock would drop by a twelfth. Instantly.

So by the time you found out about it, the damage would be done.

But you're missing the bigger picture anyways: business is business and charity is charity. The job of publicly traded corporations is to make money, not to give to charity. Then individual people can take the money the business made, and give to the charities of their individual choosing.

Having to choose which stocks to invest in based on their charitable giving portfolios just mixes everything up. The profits are all the same in the end, but charitable giving decisions around those profits should be in the hands of individual people, not corporations.