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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

Important institutions that one may want to consider include:

Open Source and Internet

  - Internet Archive [important would be some pro bono legal help due to the recent turn of events, perhaps]

  - Wikipedia [no need at the moment? Some say "overfunded  compared to others"; has anyone checked?]

  - Ladybird Web browser [coming to you in 2026: the first non-corporate Web browser from scratch; some said it couldn't be done; but those did not know Andreas Kling]

Humanity

  - International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement

  - Greenpeace

  - Amnesty International

  - UNICEF

[It's saddening that I have to add, perhaps open source software is not as urgent this year compared to stopping the bombing and killing of children, so consider how to distribute between these categories.]

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> Internet Archive [important would be some pro bono legal help due to the recent turn of events, perhaps]

I have a really hard time with this one. Their current legal situation didn't just happen to them: they made an intentional choice to do something which ~everyone who knew anything about law warned them would be catastrophic and are now facing the catastrophe that they were warned about. They acted like a small activist group with nothing to lose rather than the essential piece of infrastructure that they have become.

I appreciate that the Internet Archive only exists because it took legal risks back in the day and those risks paid off. But from a strategic perspective you really have to stop being an activist organization once you've won enough ground that being ground to a pulp by the establishment would be a catastrophic loss for humanity. At that point it's time to let the little guys with nothing to lose take the mantle and just focus on preserving the ground that you've won.

honest question to all: how do you keep pushing boundaries once you've been successful enough to transition from a scrappy activist with nothing to lose to foundational infrastructure? I get the simple answer is reduced risks, stop doing the things that made you successful, but is there another path? Surely if OpenAI can somehow go from benevolent saviour of humanity to naked profit megacorp we can find a way for the IA to keep taking big risks?

There is plenty they can still do to push boundaries and be activists, but their decision was really quite reckless. At their current level of importance, they need to be progressives, not revolutionaries. They essentially took up arms against the industry using covid as an excuse. Well, I personally despise the IP industry and think that it needs radical reform, if not complete destruction, we have to live to fight another day as well. Unless they really thought covid was truly going to kill us all and wipe us all off the planet, it was a short-sighted move on their part.

Now that's sad, I hope they learned their lesson, and I think we should all step up to help defend them. Aside from donations, I think people should be making a large amount of noise at their elected representatives to start reforming the ridiculous IP framework in the United States. The whole point of copyright and other protections was to ensure that there was some incentive to people to produce content and be able to monetize it. I think it's ludicrous to suggest that you need such an utterly long period with a shark full of teeth to go after people in order to incentivize the producing of content.

Why does it need to be the Internet Archive that takes big risks?

In the startup space it's common for a founder to, after a successful launch, hand off control of the organization to someone else who's better equipped to drive the company in slow and steady mode. If the people in charge of the Internet Archive feel like they're best equipped to be revolutionaries rather than maintaining the ground they won in the past, maybe it's time for them to transition into a new organization and hand off the IA to people who are able to run it in maintenance mode.

It’s less that Wikipedia is overfunded, but rather they’re spending quite a bit on non Wikipedia projects. If you believe in their wider mission then donate, but giving them more money isn’t going to support the website if they aren’t going to use your donations for that end.

If you have kids UNICEF is doing a great program with Paddington at the moment where you subscribe to donations and each month you get a letter from Paddington in a different country introducing you to a child there, explaining what their life is like and talking about what UNICEF is doing in there area. My son has loved his letters.

wrt Ladybird and Andreas Kling; I contributed a small patch recently (after following Andreas for many years on YouTube), and I have to say that their codebase is incredibly nice and clean for such a large project. Their community is engaging, hyper focused --- it's really impressive. They run a really tight, yet open, little community. I can recommend using the browser, and engaging with the community.

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