Let's say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren't covering it.
So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.
Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, "Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren't selling kitten deli slices?"
Some might say -- maybe you aren't an animal shelter any more. Some might say.
I wrote that a couple of years ago but it remains relevant and widely applicable, so I want to do what I can to get the Kitten Meat Deli into the general discourse. My hope is that some day we can say, "Ah yes, they are using the Kitten Meat defense, that's a poplar defense" and people will know what you're talking about.
It was originally about Mozilla becoming an advertising company but it could as easily have been about Mozilla becoming an AI company or about Mozilla going all in on cryptocurrency or about Internet Archive doing the same or about Mozilla being funded by Google or about The Long Now Foundation releasing NFTs or about Mozilla allowing W3C to bless DRM or, more recently about Wikipedia taking funding from Microsoft, OpenAI, Facebook and Amazon (and without even the fig-leaf of "donation" but as customers).
Yes, the Sliced Kittens Defense. A strong defense!
Even landen na het opstijgende geweld van Ray of Light kan geen kwaad, toch…? Sing with me:
