If we all loved cats, dogs, birds, woodlands or the countryside then we’d pay charitable dues every week or month, and those collective sums of money could really change the world.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has a million members in the UK, which is 1 in 60 people in the population. They raised £86 million (around $140 million) last year.
How many geeks are there in the general population? 1 in 60? 1 in 100? Surely the figure is at least this, and probably a lot more. Yet ORG and EFF subsist on sums far smaller than the RSPB is able to raise.
We can do better. We can make a difference.
Now is the time, and right now it really matters. Old people with inflexible minds and vested interests want to destroy our freedom to play with hardware we own, they want to monitor everything we do, constrict this wonderful thing called the internet that we created, and protect the interests of outdated corporations that have no new ideas. Let’s stop that.
Richard WM Jones 