Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Also the whole non-profit angle is immature in my opinion.

Non-profits denote nothing about their financial good-standing or moral good-standing. You can be an amoral non-profit, a moral for-profit or vice-versa. Your profit structure has nothing to do with the morals of the people inside of it.

Additionally, there a lot of non-profit executives that are profiting very healthily off of their work.



Non-profit simply tells people what the incentives/motivations are or are not.

The average for-profit company can't be trusted/expected to do what's best for anyone outside the profit structure (e.g. users or the public at large). Of course you can have exceptions in either direction, but on average for-profit orgs will likely be willing to fuck over anyone else to increase profits - intentionally or not - because profit growth is literally their purpose.

'Non-profit' advertises that you don't have to worry about that specific, powerful motivation of the org contending with your best interests.


Unfortunately, in practice, this isn't really true.

It's a less powerful motivation, in that there are not shareholders who will benefit from growth.

But in practice, executives and managers end up making more, which provides an incentive for growth.


Completely agree. In the end, it's all about the motivation and ethics of the owners. For an extereme example: OpenAI is "non-profit".




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: