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Donate to help a MySQler

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Re: Donate to help a MySQler

#41

Post by mlinsey »

anewaccountname wrote: post #38

Serious question: why should I donate for this cause when I can donate for vaccines or famine relief and literally save orders of magnitude more people?

Serious counter-question: Do you donate to those causes? If you do, are you donating as much as you possibly can?

In any case, it's natural to look out first for those in your own community (although admittedly you have to have an extremely broad definition of "community" for that to apply here). Yeah, we could get into philosophical debates about how it would actually be better to save more people by looking outside of your community, but this discussion is strictly academic if we aren't already donating as much as we feasibly can. We shouldn't critique steps in the right direction (helping others more) just because they are imperfect.

Re: Donate to help a MySQler

#42

Post by wheels »

anewaccountname wrote: post #38

Serious question: why should I donate for this cause when I can donate for vaccines or famine relief and literally save orders of magnitude more people?

Donate where you feel inspired to donate; applaud those donating to good causes that don't inspire you. It's not an optimization problem.

Re: Donate to help a MySQler

#44

Post by aneesh »

bootload wrote: post #29

"... Donations are requested to help Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer in Ukraine, provide for his son Ivan who requires a bone marrow transplant operation. The cost of this operation is expected to be between €150,000 - €250,000 ($235,000 - $400,000). Please help us provide Ivan a chance to live ..." I know this could be seen as a heartless gesture but has anyone verified with MySql that Andrii Nikitin is who…

His name is on some MySQL bug reports.(http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=32930)

There's also an address for postal mail, and info for wire transfers (http://www.theopenforce.com/2008/07/andrii-nikitin.html)

I agree, they should perhaps add this information to the main MySQL site.

Re: Donate to help a MySQler

#45

Post by [deleted] »

wheels wrote: post #32

Does anyone else find it a little disheartening that despite being hosted on a MySQL / SUN site, and despite this meaning that they're obviously not providing his family with health insurance, that they're not even offering to do any contribution matching? I'd hope for a little more from a small-ish company that just got bought for a billion dollars.

[deleted]

Re: Donate to help a MySQler

#47

Post by rms »

wheels wrote: post #37
tx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you assume that every country is a little copy of US? Ukraine uses old soviet-era state-sponsored medical system free for all citizens, i.e. you don't need an insurance. Even if he's got some kind of supplementary private insurance for private clinics, it obviously won't cover procedures in other countries, just like most American insurance companies.

I live in Germany, for the record. But more of my point is that his company seems willing to ask for donations on his behalf, but not actually help.

It's a large disconnect between the culture of MySQL and Sun.

Re: Donate to help a MySQler

#48

Post by rms »

anewaccountname wrote: post #38

Serious question: why should I donate for this cause when I can donate for vaccines or famine relief and literally save orders of magnitude more people?

You could help a lot if you just called or emailed Sun and told them.

There are a lot of email addresses and phone numbers for Sun PR people here, I'm sure they would like to know about this story. http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/contacts/index.jsp

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