>Some people make life better via charity, I try to do it via software.
...wow.
Are you seriously saying that building padmapper is a charitable act? Or am I totally misunderstanding what you said there, because...
...wow.
...wow.
Are you seriously saying that building padmapper is a charitable act? Or am I totally misunderstanding what you said there, because...
...wow.
There's a long line of argument that free entreprise is actually more helpful than charity in many circumstances.
In a sense, building any company is a charitable act, because you leave consumers better off than they were before .
Are you daft?
It's not a charitable act to start a for-profit company, because you get paid for providing the service that leaves the people better off. The whole point of charities is that they provide the service without getting paid.
(If your business is a startup that has deferred monetization until later, that still doesn't make you a charity; you've just chosen to turn away payment now in the hope that doing so will yield you a bigger payment down the road.)
That's not to say that starting a business is a bad thing or that businesses can't improve the world; but there's a clear line between what a business is and what a charity is, and it involves the expectation of getting paid. Which means a business is always going to be lower on the Do-Gooder Scale than a charity is.
Or the person at a sports event selling me beer? Are they a charity? I do want beer, and they are facilitating that...for $10/glass.
(I think that most people would not consider the beer vendor a charity, and since English is a living language, I think that the cited definition is incomplete)
Crazygringo's point is that there is a much older and more important sense of "charity," which simply means helping those in need. In that sense, Google is a very charitable project. In fact it is hard to imagine a nonprofit doing a better job.
Starting a business with someone is considered the highest level.
However, I'm not sure that providing someone with a service would qualify though.
If Google didn't exist, my life would probably be $20k/yr worse due to search, $5-10k for maps, and $3k/yr worse due to Reader. Maybe $500/yr for News. Google Plus not existing would make my life better (since people who post would post on fb instead, where I'd actually read them).
This is a Randian and ultimately vapid definition of charity. I am all for capitalism but let's not get crazy.
Edit: Capitalism is the opposite of charity because you earn your keep. This is always preferable for both parties IMO.
As does Dictionary.com's: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/charitable
And Wiktionary's: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/charitable
Would me also becoming the richest man on earth as a result matter to you? Would it diminish the value of what I would contribute? And if so, ask yourself why that should matter at all?
This isn't some Rand Objectivist thing. I just don't understand why we use words like charity and philanthropy that tie the outcome/value of something in the world to the self-sacrifice of the outcome's author. It doesn't seem all that relevant to most discussions about the value of a thing.
Last month, after spending hours filtering through CL listings to no avail, I used padmapper and found the perfect CL listed apartment in 10 minutes.
Frankly, I don't care about whether you're doing this to help people, or you want to get really filthy rich. What matters is your actions. AFAIK, you're not massively ripping me or anyone else off, you're not torturing puppies, and have no plans for world domination.
I think that the statement you quoted is explicitly saying that for-profit software isn't a charitable act. Instead, in an implicit comparison to charitable acts, it's saying that for-profit software can also make life better for users.