.
That I protest against a single person buying up control over major parts of the FLOSS community, and centralizing power?
Or that I use editing as a workaround for a bug in HN, where in some situations deleting comments becomes impossible?
Now, let's consider this another person helpfully mentioned
> Freenode is registered as a "private company limited by guarantee without share capital" performing "activities of other membership organisations not elsewhere classified", with Christel and Andrew Lee (PIA's founder) as officers, and Andrew Lee having the majority of voting rights. Any profits are not to be distributed under their articles of association, making it a not-for-profit company.
Meaning that Andrew Lee alone has control over Freenode. And, looking by it, also Snoonet. And also indirect control over many open source projects. A single person having influence over major parts of the open source world and infrastructure.
I'm not sure if you consider this bad, but I do consider it bad if a single person starts buying up everything I use daily. And I will try to prevent this centralization of power. (For the same reason I dislike Google, which also concentrates far too much power in the hands of just two people).
Do tou really want to give this power to a single person?
No intention of stirring up troubles in this thread and congrats on having your problem solved!, but large gifts of unknown / foreign origin can get a lot of attention. Especially if it goes across many countries. So it seems wise to have the sponsor checked out. Your bank and accountant will probably ask the same question at a certain point in time.
The idea that Accepting an donation from PIA could be even remotely considered money laundering or terrorism financing is beyond insane to me
An example: a financial firm is to check the UBO (ultimate benificiary owner, i.e. the real person involved) at the other end of the deal, for all counterparties. You also should check for PEPs (politically exposed persons), which can be all kinds of things (think family members of notorious regimes). The thing is, for terrorism governments supply watchlists, for PEPs they don't. So most institutions use PEP-lists that they procure elsewhere, but don't really manage. So that's where funny things happen. These are laws where compliance is pretty hard to do guarantee.
In this case you getting a €20k financing from a UK-firm, with a (his responses are now downmodded, but that part was probably true) UBO that is pretty mindfull of his privacy and the whereabouts of his money you can't follow. You use that money to finance a particular Russian contractor, via a Dutch foundation. I don't think being compliant should be awefully hard, although it would entail some work. Note that the compliancy should fall on the bank, accountant and perhaps notary involved. I just added the reply to give Boudewijn a heads-up to be mindful.
All of this doesn't stop Dutch banks from financing coffeeshops with their roots massively in the locally illegal growing of cannabis. So go figure about the impact of these laws...