On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Geoffrey Broadwell wrote:
Someone earlier in this thread mentioned that this can't be done
directly because of rules surrounding TPF's non-profit status. Someone
else pointed out the problems with TPF officers benefitting directly
from the donations, even though some of the current and former TPF
officers would be great candidates for support.
Which made me think ... wasn't this why Mozilla created a corporation?
I doubt that's why. If TPF owned The Perl Corporation (TPC), there'd still
be serious conflict of interest issues were TPC to be employing TPF board
members or other officers.
If anything, this would look even _worse_ than giving them grant money
from TPF!
The main reason a nonprofit would create a for-profit subsidiary is in
order to engage in business activities outside of that nonprofits
tax-exempt purpose. That purpose is generally defined by the nonprofit's
mission. TPF's missions is:
The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl
programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and
code.
I would guess that MoFo founded MoCo primarily because it wanted to pursue
income sources that weren't compatible with MoFo's nonprofit status. I'm
guessing that this was primarily the Google deal, and it was determined
that the income from Google would be business income, and that it would be
so much that if it came directly to MoFo it would compromise MoFo's status
as a 501c3 nonprofit.
I'd guess that the reasoning behind this is that in the Google deal,
Google gets a benefit from the money it pays. It's not a donation. That
means it's business income.
TPF is not in a similar position at this time. There is no massive source
of income available that would not be a donation, to the best of my
knowledge. If there were such a source, forming a subsidiary for-profit
corporation would be worthwhile.
-dave
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