Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At NYC salaries? In a greenfield scenario, I could easily spend $900,000 a year in just payroll and benefits I kind of don't understand what you're getting at here. They're a nonprofit. The majority of their work is coming from volunteers. They aren't paying New York salaries. This is like going to Linus and saying "You can't possibly expect Linux to be sustainable - do you have any idea how much money Microsoft pa…
> The majority of their work is coming from volunteers. > the difference is that people and companies donate their time/money because they want the project to succeed. And that volunteering time and energy are probably valuable then, especially if they can do the work of a real ISP. I think one real question to ask though is what is actually more efficient—donating volunteer time and energy to a nonprofit, or donatin…
That's a good question. Judging from software development (which may or may not map perfectly to hardware infrastructure) both seem to work pretty well. Depending on who you ask you'll get different answers about whether closed (purely paid) or open (either volunteer or mixed) is "winning".
But certainly they seem to both work, on the whole. Neither strategy is so radically inefficient that it's safe to dismiss a company that relies on one over the other.