On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:
> [Does the group actually exist yet? Google says: "No groups match > fastecuhla." Replying here instead...] > > I've been following discussions around non-profit incorporation for > FOSS projects for about a decade (including some years on the internal > mailing list for SPI Inc. -- Debian's non-profit foundation). My > strong recommendation is that we not do it ourselves. Setting up our > own non-profit takes an immense amount of energy, and keeping it going > requires continuing to jump through annoying hoops on a regular basis > (you must have a procedure for selecting a board; the board must meet > on some regular schedule, achieve quorum, and regularly elect > officers; each board meeting must have minutes produced and approved, > you must file taxes on time, ...), and it's expensive to boot (you'll > need a professional accountant, etc.). As a result, most projects that > try going it on their own end up with a horrible mess sooner or later. > It works okay if you're, say, Gnome, but most projects are not Gnome. > > But fortunately, this is a solved problem: there are several > non-profit umbrella corporations that are set up to let experts take > care of this nonsense and amortize the costs over multiple projects. > The Software Freedom Conservancy is probably the most well put > together: > http://www.sfconservancy.org/overview/ > http://www.sfconservancy.org/members/services/ > http://sfconservancy.org/about/board/ > Many large projects with complicated legal situations like Samba, > Busybox, jQuery, Wine, Boost, ... have also chosen this approach: > http://www.sfconservancy.org/members/current/ > > TL;DR: When it comes to legal matters: starting your own non-profit is > to joining an existing umbrella non-profit as CVS is to git. (And in > fact git is also a SF Conservancy member.) > > My $0.02, > -- Nathaniel > All excellent points. <snip> Chuck > >
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