On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 2:23 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I for one would think the project could be categorized as not for profit > organization. I'm not an attorney, and don't play one on the Internet, and I don't pretend to have a completely understanding of all the nuances and details, but I'll share a few things I learned during my time as the FPL. Please don't consider this as either authoritative or as legal advice -- this is just one guy's ramblings on a subject that he's passionate about. First of all, let me speak to the motivation. I think there are many people (including community members and Red Hat employees) that can see some advantages of having a non-profit organization of some flavor for the Fedora Projects. My understanding is that Red Hat even put a lot of time and effort into investigating that path in the early Fedora days. Now, for the ugly part. One of the many complications is that if a US non-profit receives the majority of its funding and support from a single corporate entity, that the non-profit begins to look like a tax shelter, and at least under US law, that causes more headaches than it is worth. I'm sure there are other complications as well, but that's the most obvious one to me. I, for one, would *love* to find a way for Fedora to be able to accept funds from outside groups. I'm not complaining about Red Hat here -- I think they've been a great corporate sponsor of the Fedora Project, and I don't personally see the need for the Fedora Project to distance itself from them. They continue to put a lot of resources (money, salaried positions, legal support -- and most importantly -- trust) in Fedora, and I'd never suggest doing anything that might jeopardize that. I would like other organizations to be able to donate money to Fedora too, and in an ideal world we could sell Fedora-branded items and have a portion of the proceeds directly benefit the project. I investigated and pushed for the ability to make this happen while I was FPL, but the stark reality is that there's no feasible way to do this at the present time. The easiest way for outside organizations to help Fedora is to directly provide support at FUDCons (such as directly paying for the catering or the internet access), or donating hardware to the Infrastructure team (and there are certain guidelines that the Infra team can share with you, if you're interested). It's not an ideal situation by any stretch of the imagination, but it's the situation we live in right now. -- Jared Smith -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
