In just over three days, MacHeist has raised $50,000 for eight high-profile international charities.
Touting this week as “The Week of the Independent Mac Developer,” MacHeist began selling a software bundle of some of the hottest apps for OS X on Monday in the hopes of increasing the profile of the Mac shareware development community as well as raising $100,000 for charity before the holiday season.
Now, only halfway through the week, MacHeist is on pace to meet its fundraising goal.
“We’re absolutely thrilled we’ve helped raise this much for charity. An opportunity like this is extremely rare, and we’re glad MacHeist gave us an opportunity to take part in such a great cause,” said Mac developer Dan Counsell, whose website creation application RapidWeaver is packaged in the bundle.
The bundle retails for $49 USD and includes such award-winning applications as Delicious Library and FotoMagico.
Because the $50,000 charity plateau was reached, all customers will now receive the popular RSS aggregator application NewsFire as part of the bundle. If $100,000 is raised before the end of the week, the award-winning text editor TextMate will be distributed to all customers.
MacHeist is donating 25% of each sale to one of eight participating charities, including United Way International, Direct Relief International, AIDS Research Alliance, PreventCancer.org, The Nature Conservancy, The World Wildlife Fund, The Hunger Project, and Save the Children.
The sale ends at 11:59 p.m. EST on Dec. 17.
Related article:
MacHeist kicks off “The Week of the Independent Mac Developer” with Mac OS X apps bundle sale – December 11, 2006
Ok, so…
If what you’re really after is to give to a charity, wouldn’t you have already given to the charity?
If what you’re really after is to bolster independent Mac developers, wouldn’t you have already bought a lot of these apps directly from them, at the more “fair” retail price?
But if what you’re really after is to get a heck of a deal for yourself (that is, after all, how that “invisible hand” thing called capitalism is supposed to work), and you can feel that your self-interest is slightly enlightened (whether it actually is or not) because charities and Mac developers also stand to benefit a little bit, why wouldn’t you go for this?
It just seems to me that everyone who is all bent out of shape about this has their head in the sand as far as how a market economy works. When did you last think that someone selling something, even if they were donating part of the profits to a good cause, had anything but their own best interests in mind?
I’m not saying capitalism is the best way or even morally right. I’m just saying all the outrage seems a bit naive.