MacHeist – Creative Charity

Over on my business blog, I wrote about MacHeist, so I won’t repeat the software details here.

What’s interesting about it for my personal blog is that it’s a great example of creative non-governmental charity. It’s a non-zero-sum game. The buyer benefits from good prices, the developers get some revenue and publicity (plus an increased user base which equals valuation) and, I hope, the MacHeist guys take a management fee so they’re incentivized to do this again.

Oh, and so far they’ve raised over a quarter million dollars for charity, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did double that by time the sale ends. Assuming such an ending number, each charity is likely to see $50K in donations that they weren’t expecting, all without any government mandates or use/threat of violence.

This is “charity applied to mac shareware” – an admittedly narrow category. Imagine if it were repeated for thousands of more narrow categories throughout society.