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Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

Gotta say, when I read about how Bram Moolenaar, the author and maintainer of Vim, works sometimes to build schools in remote areas of Uganda and encourages users to donate to that cause—not once did I question how that is helpful or what he's doing with people's money.

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I am not sure if you're supporting, or opposing what Moolenaar does here. But a large difference is, that, although i am not sure if there's any sort of transparent reports available on the project, they don't ask "donate so I can keep working on vim", they specify "Donate to help poor Ugandan children"

That's what I'm saying, in part. Mr. Moolenaar's reports on his own on-the-grounds activities are quite clear (from what I remember now, a bunch of years later), and the goal of ‘build some schools’ doesn't make me wonder ‘what exactly does that mean’.

Moreover, the encouragement to donate to that charity is written into the license of Vim, and still I never went ‘ugh, why does he pollute the software with politics’ or anything like that.

They absolutely do say "To motivate Bram and others to continue working on Vim please send a donation." It's the second sentence on https://www.vim.org/sponsor/

They GO ON to say that they'll use the money to help kids in Uganda, which is great (both for transparency and the thing itself).

There is a difference between:

>Hey guys when I’m not working on this thing I’m building homes for some of the poorest and neediest people on earth. If you want to help me here is a link.

And

>HEY YOU USE WIKIPEDIA RIGHT? GIVE US MONEY TO KEEP IT GOING YA JERK (we will donate the money to orgs completely unrelated to Wikipedia and which exist to try and make people hate each other)

He doesn't claim vim's going to stop working if you don't donate to that effort though.

Wikipedia's banner ads make it sound like it desperately needs support even to keep running as it is.

> build schools in remote areas of Uganda

That cause is a lot more noble than the causes that wikimedia supports.

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