There’s a thing we tend to do as engineers where we hear a thing and then start thinking through the implications and design, which is normal, but also we seem to assume we’re the only ones who’ve ever thought about it, and therefore our concerns must be unaddressed, and we’re brilliant, so clearly nobody’s ever thought of them before, so we’ve gotta share them. If you’d like to see this behavior in action, this is the thread for you.
I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO.<p>You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be taken away from you.
> [...] my two promises by turning Ecosia into a so-called “steward-owned company”. This model imposes two legally binding and irreversible restrictions on us:<p>I really hope that we'll get a legal precedent for this actually being possible and durable in at least some countries, because that was the promise of OpenAI at some point as well.<p>(That's not to say I have reason to suspect anything bad of the current or any potential future stewards of Ecosia, but I'll prefer a hard legal guarantee over a promise any time, especially when charitable donations are involved.)
Their website is confusing. So it's a non-profit for planting trees.. that's also a search engine? How are those two things at all related or have any benefit to being combined into one company?
I really like the idea of Ecosia and Steward Owned companies, but as somebody who wants out of the Ad game completely, uses uBlock Origin religiously and pays for services like email and search. I haven't actually used Ecosia, but am interested in others experiences with it. But I imagine in the HN crowd a lot of other people fit the same profile as myself.
I have and still use Ecosia Daily.<p>Its a search engine, the same as all the other search engines.<p>Ecosia delivers a combination of search results from Yahoo!, Google, Bing and Wikipedia.<p>Advertisements are delivered by Yahoo! and Microsoft Advertising as part of a revenue sharing agreement with the company.<p>Ad revenue is then used to plant trees<p>you cant complain about that
Does anybody happen to have a pointer to further research this "Steward Owned company" legal structure? Since they're based in Germany, I assume this is a translation of a German legal term of sorts, but I couldn't find the original or anything that would let me learn more about it.
Ecosia also recently announced a partnership with Qwant to build their own search engine index! This is great for the open web and I'm very excited to see where Ecosia goes next
Trees don't need planting.<p>Trees need a safe place to grow without saplings getting destroyed.<p>But trees absolutely don't need planting. Besides, a healthy forest has to go through pioneering stages first.
Ecosia have been going a while, and I don't want to be that guy 'just asking questions', but...<p>Is there some sort of independent verification of the trees being planted and their impact? I wonder if there is a study into the effect of their interesting green reinvestment setup vs a traditional for-profit businesses (Google is the obvious example) and their environmental impacts.
Given how bad Google search has gotten recently, I'd give this a try even without the trees. If they can provide a decent search experience _and_ reduce CO2, even better.
We have legal structures with which to make statements like this about nonprofit status, structures which bind the promise so that we don't have to take your word on it.
> Shares can’t be sold at a profit or owned by people outside of the company. No profits can be taken out of the company.<p>It it a worker-owned coop then? If so, why not calling it that?
I mean, cool, and ok, but it is kind of ridiculous to consider taking profits from your company "unethical".<p>And you're taking them anyway in the form of planting trees. You could have just had a normal company and taken all the profit you wanted and used it to plant trees and done the same thing. I guess this is somehow more tax-efficient, but it’s not really any different in principle.