I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.

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So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?

Can you see how these two statements are not the same thing? The former is not something anyone had said until you did so while the latter is what the entire rest of this conversation has been about until you tried to pivot to the former.

Indirectly yes a customer absolutely has a say in what an employee spends money on if they are aware of it because it’s the customer’s money that’s indirectly paying for the thing. An employee is a part of a business and when an employee engages in some activity even on their own time if people are aware they work for that company, then that reflects on the company and vice versa. That’s one of the reasons companies have very strict rules about representing yourself as an employee or agent of the company.

Furthermore the higher an employee’s position in a company the stronger their actions reflect on the company. For someone like a co-founder, practically the highest position in a company, those actions reflect very strongly on the company. The only actions that reflect stronger are ones done directly by the company itself.

This is why HR departments exist, they protect the business from the actions of its employees (or at least attempt to).

No. I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.

That’s not what you said though. I don’t think anyone is arguing that employees of a company are obligated to disclose their spending habits, that would just be ludicrous. However, if that information was available or if the company itself made donations/purchases it’s perfectly reasonable as a customer to decide not to support that kind of behavior by continuing to do business with that company.

Just as one example Chick-fil-A is rather famously anti-lgbtq and regularly donates part of their profits to anti-lgbtq organizations. As a consumer it’s entirely reasonable and moral to refuse to do business with them in order to reduce the money being funnelled to morally repugnant organizations.

Calling him Thomas Edison is giving him far too much credit. Edison may have been a self aggrandizing asshole, but he also did have a few accomplishments to his name. Musk is a glorified venture capitalist, only instead of just taking a chunk of the profits he buys the whole company so he can steal credit for the company’s achievements. Elon Musk has never created a single thing in his life. He has in fact been a net negative as every company he has ever been involved with would have been better off without Musk’s “help”.

This has largely worked out with Postgres. The trick is making sure you have a few different competing corporations so that they can’t force through anything without convincing all their competitors to support them. If done right the corporations end up paying for maintainers as well as to develop universally useful features. It’s better not to have the corporations involved, but if they’re going to be involved it’s better to have as many of them as you can get. The worst case scenario is only one or two corporations being heavily involved.