Quote:
Originally Posted by Bharat Nain
And I agree, in general they should accept all the sponsorship they can, but definitely not the kinds that support anything against its values.
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But nearly every company supports or does something that could be considered against FIRST's values, and other things that companies do might depend entirely on your perspective. To a smoker, a tobacco company as a sponsor may not be inherently wrong. A biotech firm that works with embryonic stem cells would be a fantastic fit for a sponsor for some, but a company profiting from murder to others.
Can you imagine the uproar if FIRST turned down enormous sponsorship $$$ for something you consider frivolous? To use my example above, imagine FIRST turned down an enormous medical company sponsorship because someone in FIRST believed that embryonic stem cell research was wrong. To many in this community, that would be a terrible mistake. To others, it would be the right choice. There are nearly zero "obviously against-values" companies.
Even companies that don't work in hot-button fields might be considered unacceptable: Microsoft certainly didn't show gracious professionalism when they broke anti-trust laws in the 90s. Google (and any other search engine with a chinese site) aids the chinese government in suppressing free speech. Sony embedded rootkits in CDs it sold to paying customers. Defense contractors make weapons such as cluster bombs that can indiscriminately kill civilians long after the war is over. Governments engage in wars of opportunity. IBM sold products to Nazis. Power companies own coal plants which spew smog, cancer, and global-warming-causing fumes, or they own nuclear plants that create radioactive waste, or they dam up rivers and destroy habitats.
In short, the line between "against FIRST's values" and "in line with FIRST's values" is
extremely fuzzy, and mistakes would inevitably be made.