[billpatrianakos]

At the end they ask people to ask their employers to stop using Microsoft software like the kind causing this problem.

First, I really doubt all but a handful of companies would actually do this on account of the FSF site being blocked. It's a simple cost benefit analysis. The cost of replacing such software is high and the occurrences of such mistakes that would actually hurt a company are rare. Therefor it's not happening the vast majority of times.

Secondly, I'm surprised the FSF is using a service that has anything to do with proprietary, closed source, non-free software. Given their philosophy you'd think they'd have found some way to collect donations that uses free software from top to bottom. Maybe I'm way off on this but one of my first thoughts was that maybe even complaining about this takes away just a bit of the FSF's credibility. They preach the gospel of free software but when it's time to fundraise they make an exception? Is this a "do as I say, not as I do" situation now?

I'm not trying to be overly critical and I realize this may be a bit pedantic too. It's not a big deal to me, just thought it interesting. Food for thought maybe.

[isaacaggrey]

> Secondly, I'm surprised the FSF is using a service that has anything to do with proprietary, closed source, non-free software.

Where does FSF's post say anything about FSF using proprietary software? As far as I can tell, the post is simply about how some r/GNU redditors [1] noticed how Microsoft's gateway was incorrectly categorizing donate.fsf.org, not that FSF itself is using a service that is proprietary (unless you mean PayPal).

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/gnu/comments/v21q3/how_microsoft_thr...

[pmorici]

They accept donations in BitCoins http://bitcoin.org/ who's reference implementation is open source.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/bitcoins-a-new-way-to-don...

[kaolinite]

When you say mention "a service", are you referring to PayPal? In fairness, there are 0 payment gateways (as far as I know) that are open-source, sadly, so they don't have much choice. I guess the only option they have is Bitcoin, which they accept, however as that hasn't caught on they have little choice other services too.

[ams6110]

So, when it comes to walking the walk, are you saying FSF is just like everyone else: free software is great, as long as it doesn't stand in the way of making money?

[jiggy2011]

If they couldn't raise funding they would be unable to do anything.

They would also have to forego actually purchasing anything incase proprietary software was used anywhere in the supply chain.

It's a bit like the whole "Al-gore/Jet" argument, sometimes you have to make sacrifices of principles for the "bigger picture".

[kaolinite]

Without online donations, they wouldn't be able to raise as much money to support their campaigns. Personally I believe that it is worth it, just as it is worth using a closed-source machine to save somebody's life, rather than let them die for the sake of ideals. Of course the FSF would rather use free software to take donations (accepting bitcoin was an attempt to enable this), however by sticking to ideals in this situation it would harm free software more than it would help it.

[rapind]

You realize they are a non-profit right?

[simonbrown]

They could have people mail cheques.