On 02/07/2009 01:24, Toma wrote: > I did a little leg work to see what the Gnome and KDE folks are doing. > > http://foundation.gnome.org/legal/ > http://foundation.gnome.org/finance/ > (Yes, the 2007 books are not available! Naughty Naughty!) > Looks like they run the show themselves, but get free-ish legal > services from SFLC > > http://ev.kde.org/ > These guys also run the show themselves. > > Do we know just how much time gets spent doing all this book keeping > and ground work for these foundations? I get the feeling its a bit of > work at the start to setup all the copyright, trademarks, bank > accounts, tax forms etc etc, but once its going its probably not that > hard to do. (No im not putting my hand up...)
I honestly have very little idea what would truly be involved for us to do it ourselves. I know many orgs do it themselves. Those you already mentioned, FreeBSD and Apache come to mind. One of the reasons I think the other big orgs are able to do their own thing is there is much more organization to their Organization. They have a very well defined structure and development processes. E on the other hand has intentionally resisted creating any structure. This is not bad. Just the way it is. But I think that fact makes it difficult to run a formal NPO. I think the things you just mentioned are quite a lot of work. And I think some of them require knowledge I'd be willing to bet few of us already own. Which means there is more work involved in learning what to do, and how to do it right/well. And then there is the work involved when something goes wrong somewhere (think legal dispute, IRS issues, donator wanting proper receipts?, others?). Now, it may very well be that all is required to form an NPO is to fill out an IRS form, open a bank account if we desire to accept donations, and file yearly IRS forms. Bang, done. In many cases I suspect that would really do. So we might get away with it. But, lets go back to the beginning here, and ask "*Why* do we need to form an NPO?". A good question, especially considering E might very well be older than some of its contributers, and its gotten along without for so long. The impetus for my looking into it last year, and again this year is simply GSoC, and the large donation Google makes to us. They provided a rather large donation to E, that had to be accepted by a US resident. Said US resident carried that tax liability. This will happen again this year provided we are in fact accepted. The only other need we have had to my knowledge up to this point would possibly be other peoples donations. Technically the donations we've accepted in the past had tax consequences for both the person who accepted them for E and for those giving the donations. Presently those donations are not deductible. If we were an NPO those donating would have the ability to deduct them. So, to answer my own question... I'm sure we could get by without forming a NPO. Our perceived needs are quite small. But I brought it up to get people discussing it, to see if more needs get kicked up. In my head I keep thinking legal cya. Legal representation is one of those things you may never need, but if you do you'd be quite sorry to not have it. Now SFLC may represent an org even if they are not an NPO, not sure. So that there may further reduce our need for NPO. I think its very easy to argue we do not need one. But what I am hoping to do here is get people to discuss, and see if maybe we do in fact have a genuine need, and simply never knew it. > > Toma > > 2009/2/7 Ravenlock <ravenl...@ravenlock.us>: >> Hello, >> >> [Not a development topic.. but I need to hit the right audience] >> >> Last year, with our acceptance in GSoC, it came to my attention that we >> might possibly benefit from forming an official 501(c)(3) Non Profit >> Organization. This has become fresh in my mind again this year due to >> GSoC, but also due to the "Bounty" that has appeared regarding the E >> File Manager. >> [snip]
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