On 05/13/2016 10:35 AM, Tucker Moreau wrote: > Hey, > > Have you considered reaching out to a group like Software in the > Public Interest and accepting donations through them? It's how Debian, > Arch, and several others take donations exactly so they don't have to > deal with the trouble of banks that you're going through now. > Admittedly, it sounds somewhat worrying that OpenSSL itself wouldn't > hold the funds directly this way, but I suppose it's better than > having the funds indefinitely locked in PayPal or not being able to > take donations at all. We have considered this approach, in detail, and the comfort level isn't there. A requirement of their 501(c) status for such organizations is that they can't make any commitments as to how funds raised in our name will be spent. We would have to trust their good judgment in deciding how those funds were used. We found that such arrangements haven't always worked out as intended, and at any rate the OpenSSL team places a very high priority on maintaining independence from undue outside influence. If this outside charity were to accumulate a significant amount of funding then that would constitute undue influence. FWiW when this was discussed I made exactly that argument to my colleagues; that we'd be better off entrusting a third party with donations than losing them entirely. But, there was a strong consensus that clearly established independence trumped any hypothetical financial gain. We have turned down other donations-with-strings opportunities in the past for similar reasons. Also, while we value the individual donations received via PayPal, the bulk of our donation funding has been received via bank transfers (Swift/ACH), and that is unaffected by the closing of our PayPal account. -Steve M. -- Steve Marquess OpenSSL Software Foundation 20-22 Wenlock Road London N1 7GU United Kingdom +44 1785508015 +1 301 874 2571 direct marquess at opensslfoundation.org stevem at openssl.org
