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On Feb 17, 2019, at 18:38, Furkan Mustafa <furkan@example.com> wrote:

I know the Raspberry Pi Foundation is legally a "Charity". But I
believe it is very very commercial.

They are basicly selling the devices and looking for profit.

Indeed, like all charities. Charities need profits so that they can actually get work done. Without profits a charity uses up all income on internal costs and there is nothing left to spend on the actual objectives of the charity.

There is even this dirty issue =>
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=149426

Which seems to be explained in that same thread. It's ok to have an opinion on the issue, but they are clear about the use of crypto here and that's orthogonal to RF being a charity or not.

I'm only not okay in general asking for volunteer work.
Except when it's really charity, where everybody is volunteering.

That's your stance. The issue here is that when you have people working full time on organising a group to reach clearly defined objectives, it is difficult to request that they don't get a salary.

Similarly, and it's pretty obvious in the case of the Raspberry Foundation, to create hardware you actually need to buy materials and assemble them, at which point it seems extremely unrealistic to expect people (in this case sub-contractors) to work for free.

From the above two statements, either a charity creates and sells hardware at a price, which provides for salaries for intellectual work and payment to subcontractors, or the intellectual work to organize the system is denied and the hardware is sold at cost, which only provides for payment to subcontractors.

It seems to me that such a position is not sustainable. Either you accept that there is some paid intellectual work and paid subcontractors to reach the organization's goals, or you don't accept any payment for any kind of work, and then you don't have a Raspberry Foundation (you have low cost board makers, which the RF is *not* as defined by its charter). You can't have it both ways.

A relatively low payment (minimum wage) would be okay IMO considering the case.

The thing is such organisations do provide salaries for some kind of jobs and actively ask for unpaid labor for some other jobs so as to increase the profit rate and be able to invest more on reaching their objectives.

Unpaid work is typically low commitment work (a few hours a week), low skilled work (sorting goods), etc.

Although, I don't know their internals very much, a slightly deeper research might prove me wrong.

The best way to find if a charity is fishy or not is to check staff salaries. On the 2017 financial statements of the RF you can find that they have 25 executive positions and 72 non executive positions. There are only "bands" of payment for the executive class so it is only possible to say that the salary split is between:

£35000 av. for the 72 non executives vs £100,000 av for the 25 executives

and

£38000 av. for the 72 non executives vs £90,000 av for the 25 executives

Which should be compared with standard salaries in the industry.

It'd be better if they explain why they are not going to pay for it, on the page where they ask volunteer work.

Because they are a charity and by definition rely on volunteer work for low commitment jobs. People who understand the concept of charity also understand that what is requested from them is low commitment jobs, which typically is what volunteer translators do.

Re: [tlug] Raspberry Pi translation team looking for Japanese translator