As written earlier, I think that both Wikipedia and the Linux Foundation are committing fraud because both get hundreds of millions of dollars of donations every year, yet only use about 2-3% of that money to actually run, maintain and develop the projects in question, with the rest of the money going to other things, oftentimes things that have absolutely nothing to do with those tasks. For example, the Linux Foundation proudly proclaims in its annual financial report that 60% of the donations it receives goes to "diverse community members" (while, at the same time, less than 3% of the donations goes to actual Linux kernel development.)
Why do I think this is fraud? Two main reasons:
Firstly, neither one is a charity organization nor a social activist organization. One is an educational organization dedicated to collecting, writing and freely disseminating information in the form of an extensive online encyclopedia. The other is an organization created for the development and maintenance of a free operating system kernel.
Dumping hundreds of millions of dollars that are donated to them into political activism is not part of either description. When people see and use Wikipedia, they are not seeing an activist organization dedicated to political activism (in any other way than just providing a free source of encyclopedic information). Likewise when people see the Linux Foundation, they are only seeing an organization dedicated to the development and maintenance of a free operating system kernel, not an activist organization.
If these organizations want to dump money into political activism they have the prerogative to do so. However, that should be the owners' own money, not the money of donors, most of whom are completely unaware that this is happening with their money behind the scenes. When they start using donated money to do this, they are committing fraud.
Secondly, neither one of them does exactly advertise that over 90% of the donated money goes to something completely unrelated to running, maintaining and developing each respective project.
For example, and quite egregiously, Wikipedia engages in semi-regular donation drives where visitors are plastered with a banner that begs for donations and quite explicitly states that it is to "keep Wikipedia independent". In other words, it's extremely clearly and directly implied that all the donation money is needed and used to run the servers and internet connections so that the site can remain independent and not just be acquired and owned by some private megacorporation with vested interests.
Those donation-begging banners are LYING, plain and simple. Wikipedia already has enough money to run the servers for at least 50 years. They do not need a single penny more in a long, long time. They are not in desperate need of any more donation money to "keep Wikipedia independent". That's just a pure and complete lie.
The real truth is that over 90% of the donated money does not go into the server and internet costs but completely unrelated things. They are, in other words, throwing donation money away, money that could be used to run the servers for decades and decades, into completely unrelated things.
A very similar situation is happening with the Linux Foundation, where the vast majority of donors, I'm quite certain, are bamboozled into believing that they are contributing to the maintenance and development of Linux, when in reality only a small percentage of the money is used for that purpose and the rest is thrown away at unrelated things.
Both of these are frauds, pure and simple.
What makes it scary (and also the "biggest frauds this century", as I classify them in those blog posts) is that neither organization will ever face consequences for this. Neither will be held accountable, and neither will experience any repercussions. On the contrary, quite a lot of people still fully support them even after they learn of this.
That's the scary part. And that's something that other fraudsters dream they could do, rather than go to jail.
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