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Comment by gawker | Hacker News Reader

I think it's absolutely great that they've donated all the proceeds to Wikipedia :) Congratulations. It's heartwarming to know that although there are some free loaders, you were still made a pretty penny.

On the other hand, how come all the design work, copy writing, etc are considered free? That's just masking the actual cost of the product.

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We made those things with our own hands.

But surely your time was worth something. Isn't that the first lesson of running a business -- pay yourself first?

If you're doing something you really love, money is just a side effect.

Loving what you do never bought groceries. So the actual answer has to be 'I have enough money from other sources to live on'.

The money spent on essentials may also be essential, but things can both be essential and the side effects of processes which have some other primary intent.

Doing something for free doesn't get you any cash as a side effect.

I'm not sure why you don't get this, but there's a huge gap between not having money be the primary intended result of your actions and having money not at all be a result of your actions.

Perhaps they draw fixed salaries from the business as a whole, and since they'd intended to donate the proceeds of this particular project to charity anyway, they didn't see any point in allocating any portion of their sunk fixed costs to it. Note that they didn't include rent, electricity, etc. either.

The design/dev/video costs were minuscule compared to the production costs.

"I think it's absolutely great that they've donated all the proceeds to Wikipedia"

Looking at their quirky web page of comparisons, I think it would be hilarious if the wikipedia deletionist camp responded by deleting all the articles quoted on their page. I'll never donate a penny to wikipedia until that social problem is eradicated. "Here's $70K of value... whoops deleted"

Think of it as increasing the signal-to-noise ratio by $70K?

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