As a result of our participation in the Summer of Code project last
summer and this summer, Google gave the git community some money. Most
of that money went to defraying travel costs to the SoC mentor summit
and the GitTogether, both last year and this year.
However, we still have about $500 USD remaining. Because of the way
Google hands out the money (they want to deal with one entity per
project, and git has no legal entity), all of the remaining money is
being held personally by me.
For accounting and tax reasons, I don't want to hold it later than Dec
31st. So I am soliciting suggestions from the community on what to do
with the money.
Some possibilities are:
1. Become an affiliated project of an organization like The Software
Freedom Conservancy or Software in the Public Interest. These are
non-profit groups to whom we (or anyone else who wants to, for that
matter) can donate money earmarked for a particular project. They
handle the accounting and hold the money, and then we get it out
when we need it for something.
Of course, then we still have the question of what that "something"
is. So far, all money has been used for travel aid. Suggestions
welcome.
The upsides of this path are that it would handle the issue for
future years, and it would make it easy for people to donate money
to git if they wanted to. The downside is that the process may take
a while, so it may not actually happen in the next month.
Some relevant links for further reading:
http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/overview/
http://www.spi-inc.org/treasurer/associated-project-howto.html
2. Donate the money to some non-profit (by the way, all discussion of
taxes and non-profit here is with respect to the United States, as
the money is being held in the US). Possible recipients include a
software freedom organization like those listed above, or something
not software-specific like the EFF. It might be nice to contribute
to projects that help us build git, like curl, libxdiff, or
asciidoc, but AFAIK we can't do so in a tax-exempt way. gcc/mingw
is another candidate; we can probably donate to the Free Software
Foundation for that.
Basically I don't want to hold on to this money, I want it to go
somewhere useful, and I don't want to make a unilateral decision.
Please let me know what people think would be useful.
-Peff
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