Yeah, I was thinking of the US as well, and I meant non-profit, which doesn't have tax deductible donations but is assumed to not make money. The problem is there is a lot of work around becoming a legal entity and accepting donations or whatever. I honestly have no idea how much work exactly - but certainly not zero. I have no idea how non-US entities work.
—Mark _______________________ Mark E. Anderson <m...@macports.org> MacPorts Trac WikiPage <https://trac.macports.org/wiki/mark> GitHub Profile <https://github.com/markemer> On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 2:02 AM Ryan Schmidt <ryandes...@macports.org> wrote: > On May 16, 2021, at 14:46, Mark Anderson wrote: > > > I keep wondering if we became like a not-for-profit If we could get > someone like MacStadium or Amazon or something to donate server time to us. > Or accept donations from Github sponsorship. I could look into what that > would take, although it might be way more trouble than it's worth. I think > my current corp lawyer knows non-profit law - I could bring it up next time > I see them. > > MacStadium already donates the use of an Apple Silicon Mac mini to us. I > am not aware of whether Amazon offers free persistent Mac servers with root > access to open source projects. > > Accepting donations through GitHub Sponsors or any other means would, I > suspect, require the formation of a legal entity for MacPorts, which would > be the owner of the business bank account we would probably have to open. > We've discussed becoming a legal entity a few times over the years but it > hasn't been done. If we do it, my preference would be for MacPorts to be a > U.S. entity, since I am in the U.S. and since MacPorts was started by Apple > and is for the benefit of Apple users and Apple is a U.S. company. A > different suggestion was that we should join an existing free software > organization and leave all the legalities up to them, and funnel donations > through them. I don't think that idea was supported by everyone so that > didn't happen either. > > If we accepted donations, we would have to develop guidelines for how the > donations could be spent. > > Being recognized as a not-for-profit is a whole 'nother can of worms. > First one has to form a legal entity, then one has to apply to be > recognized as a not-for-profit (which incurs additional fees) and make a > case for why that should be, a process which can take years, and the answer > to the application could be no. For example there was increased scrutiny of > non-profit organization applications in the field of open source software > in 2010; see https://opensource.org/node/840. That's what I recall from > researching the process in the U.S. It may differ in other countries. > >
