[MUD-Dev] Criminalize Community Volunteers?

[Greg Underwood]

Madrona Tree writes:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Buehler" <johnbue at email.msn.com>
> To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2000 7:23 PM
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Criminalize Community Volunteers?
> 
> 
> > This strikes me as very strange, Madrona.  If AOL cannot financially
> > tolerate paying salary, paying benefits, as well as managing and
> > equipping that many employees, why insist that they be employees?
> > Such insistence means that certain business opportunities will
> > simply have to be passed over as non-viable.
> 
> Or companies will simply need to learn to work efficiently enough to make
> the opportunities viable.  What I mean is - if the *only* way to make
> money
> is to use unpaid labor, then I would have to say that that opportunity is
> non-viable.

How do you think the Linux movement gets things done?  Sure, some people
get paid for their work, but the vast majority of the code distributed by
Red Hat was not paid for by Red Hat.  Is their model non-viable?

>  However, I betcha anything that using unpaid labor is not the
> only way to solve the problem of customer service.

Personally, I think the companies just need to make sure they don't give
their volunteer's *anything* of real-world value.  No free account, no
paycheck, nothing.  As long as they are not compensated in any way, and
know that going into the deal, I don't see a problem (Not a lawyer, yadda
yadda).

My understanding of the AOL suit is that by being given some small amount
of compensation, the volunteers became implicit employees, and are now
demanding just compensation for that employment under the sweatshop laws. 
It's not an argument over whether companies can or should use *real*
volunteers to profit, just whether they can compensate those volunteers in
any meaningful way or not.

-Greg



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