> Shares can’t be sold at a profit or owned by people outside of the company. No profits can be taken out of the company. It it a worker-owned coop then? If so, why not calling it that?
No, that alone does not make it a worker-owned coop.
Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
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Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#42> Shares can’t be sold at a profit or owned by people outside of the company. No profits can be taken out of the company. It it a worker-owned coop then? If so, why not calling it that?
The model they use is relatively well known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steward-ownership
My personal experience with this model boils down to: you make a company and a charity. Where the charity owns special share categories in the company.
You can then have other share types for founders and investors. These share types can essentially be bought out (e.g. an investor share can be bought for 5x of it's initial value, say, allowing for investment with a 5x cap). Essentially allowing the charity to gain full shareholding at a certain point. But there is no requirement to have these other share types - but they are useful drivers to get the company off the ground.
Obviously this type of investment isn't something traditional VCs care for; other more philanthropic oriented sources are required.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#43Does anybody happen to have a pointer to further research this "Steward Owned company" legal structure? Since they're based in Germany, I assume this is a translation of a German legal term of sorts, but I couldn't find the original or anything that would let me learn more about it.
It sounds like a gGmbH, but the Imprint ( https://www.ecosia.org/imprint ) still says Ecosia GmbH (-> For-Profit).
I looked up the bylaws just now (mostly because I'm procrastinating). It looks like they have a gGmbH that owns 99% of the shares (by number of shares), but founders retain 99% of the voting rights. Founders' shares are barred from receiving dividends, and the gGmbH has veto rights in relation to any certain changes that would fundmentally alter this ownership structure.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#44I really like the idea of Ecosia and Steward Owned companies, but as somebody who wants out of the Ad game completely, uses uBlock Origin religiously and pays for services like email and search. I haven't actually used Ecosia, but am interested in others experiences with it. But I imagine in the HN crowd a lot of other people fit the same profile as myself.
You pay for search and email? What services do you use? May I ask you why, if you're wanting to go into it?
Kagi and Proton here
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#45Does anybody happen to have a pointer to further research this "Steward Owned company" legal structure? Since they're based in Germany, I assume this is a translation of a German legal term of sorts, but I couldn't find the original or anything that would let me learn more about it.
https://purpose-economy.org/en/companies/ gives an impression if you click through to the company descriptions, they tend to explain what is meant. Otherwise the term seems to be understood in English, there is a wikipedia article that seems correct to me. Or was that one missing the information you seek?
Thanks for the pointer!
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Fastmaol? Is it inconvenient to not use Gmail?
Not parent, but: The primary inconvenience I see with de-googling is just the sheer number of things that become just slightly harder. For one, Login with Google. Now, I know people de-googling will probably want to have separate accounts rather than SSO anyways, but it is an important consideration. You also lose GDrive and the GSuite in general, which alternatives exist, yes, but IMO not as good. Also, most people…
All great points. I try to de-google mostly from a personal perspective (though still haven't gotten off Maps or Android). I use loads of Google products at work though because I'm not the decision maker there.
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#47Ecosia have been going a while, and I don't want to be that guy 'just asking questions', but... Is there some sort of independent verification of the trees being planted and their impact? I wonder if there is a study into the effect of their interesting green reinvestment setup vs a traditional for-profit businesses (Google is the obvious example) and their environmental impacts.
This is my main problem with Ecosia as well. I don't believe planting trees is really a good option to help the climate and I have zero trust in tracking progress of those projects in a lot of countries. I would much rather them e.g. investing in solar or sponsoring open source projects.
It seems they are also diversifying their investments into other climate impact projects like solar (see some of the projects here: https://blog.ecosia.org/climate-projects/).
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#48Their website is confusing. So it's a non-profit for planting trees.. that's also a search engine? How are those two things at all related or have any benefit to being combined into one company?
Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#49I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO. You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be ta…
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Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish more people would self-host email. Email getting centralised to a handful of providers is no good for anyone.
I stopped self hosting when my host got blacklisted and I lost about a year of emails with my grandmother… I just thought she was reading them but not having the energy to respond but when I visited at Christmas I saw that all my emails were in her spam box.
The unfortunate thing is that more than any other service, email feels like the one on which I cannot risk to compromise reliability. This sort of story (thank you for sharing) unfortunately fits with my own experience managing my University's undergraduate society's local email server. Non-stop headaches and complete indifference from every group which affects your setup.