The correct term is stakeholder and yes, of course, those who donated have a stake in the project. It won't be a legally binding contractual stake but not everything in life has to be measured to legally binding contractual standards. There are such things as ethics beyond law where people have to consider their obligations to other people even when they aren't legal obligations.
This means that you, like DVNO, believe that Toady has a moral obligation to take every donator's wishes (which you boldly assume he is able to know and harmonize with each other) into account when he's making decisions about DF, yes? I don't share that point of view. When someone donates, which is an entirely voluntary choice that they are making, Toady may take that as an indication that they like what he's been doing so far and/or what he intends to do. Should donations taper off, he might conclude that some people out there aren't pleased with his recent performance, and respond as he sees fit. A voluntary donation to a project, made without any
explicit promise of gaining a degree of control over that project, does not buy you any legal
or moral right to influence the project's direction.
It's like if some stranger sent you twenty bucks in an envelope, then showed up a month later asking you to drop whatever you're doing to go to the beach with them, and then called you a selfish bastard when you said no. They
once gave you twenty bucks, after all. That stranger is the bastard, trying to retroactively turn a gift into a debt. Does Toady have a "stake" in the life of every person who downloaded and played DF for free? I hope not.
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Topic: toady (Read 2986 times)