Becoming a legal entity and accepting donations (was: Re: Buildbot Performance)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 16, 2021, at 14:46, Mark Anderson wrote:

> I keep wondering if we became like a not-for-profit If we could get someone like MacStadium or Amazon or something to donate server time to us. Or accept donations from Github sponsorship. I could look into what that would take, although it might be way more trouble than it's worth. I think my current corp lawyer knows non-profit law - I could bring it up next time I see them.

MacStadium already donates the use of an Apple Silicon Mac mini to us. I am not aware of whether Amazon offers free persistent Mac servers with root access to open source projects.

Accepting donations through GitHub Sponsors or any other means would, I suspect, require the formation of a legal entity for MacPorts, which would be the owner of the business bank account we would probably have to open. We've discussed becoming a legal entity a few times over the years but it hasn't been done. If we do it, my preference would be for MacPorts to be a U.S. entity, since I am in the U.S. and since MacPorts was started by Apple and is for the benefit of Apple users and Apple is a U.S. company. A different suggestion was that we should join an existing free software organization and leave all the legalities up to them, and funnel donations through them. I don't think that idea was supported by everyone so that didn't happen either.

If we accepted donations, we would have to develop guidelines for how the donations could be spent.

Being recognized as a not-for-profit is a whole 'nother can of worms. First one has to form a legal entity, then one has to apply to be recognized as a not-for-profit (which incurs additional fees) and make a case for why that should be, a process which can take years, and the answer to the application could be no. For example there was increased scrutiny of non-profit organization applications in the field of open source software in 2010; see https://opensource.org/node/840. That's what I recall from researching the process in the U.S. It may differ in other countries.