Steam Translation Community Slaving Away 214
An anonymous reader writes "Steam has decided to build a community effort to get its Steam platform and game files translated by the community, but here is the catch: Translators do not get paid. Millions could be saved by Steam by making the community work for free. The article describes basic estimates on how much is saved by Steam in translation costs."
I sense a disterbance is the force (Score:5, Informative)
It's like a hundred million lawyers just cackled with insane glee!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program
Re:And? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean apart from the fact that this is almost certain to be a violation of the FLSA? http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/docs/volunteers.asp [dol.gov] for more information.
The shortened version is that you can't accept volunteer labor unless you're a religious institution, a charitable organization or are public sector or are a similar type of non-profit entity. Valve definitely can't accept volunteer labor if its going to be profiting from it.
Re:And? (Score:5, Informative)
The FLSA says that EMPLOYEES can't volunteer their time. In other words, I work for company X, I can't then "volunteer" an extra few hours to the company. Could someone please point to the point of the FLSA that refers to non-employees of Valve?