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

[Andrew Janke]

Software Freedom Conservancy exists largely to help FLOSS orgs do this
sort of thing safely and conveniently, while retaining independent
governance. I believe Homebrew had a good experience with them, and
Buildbot itself is a member. Was that one of the options considered when
this question came up before?

https://sfconservancy.org/

Amazon AWS supports FLOSS projects by providing free AWS Promotional
Credits to FLOSS projects. It looks like you could maybe use these to
buy mac1.metal EC2 instances, and that would give you full-machine root
access. But I dunno; those are expensive instances and the provisioning
level and conversion process seems a little complicated. The AWS
mac1.metal VMs are Intel-based, not Apple Silicon.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/aws-promotional-credits-open-source-projects/

I dunno how much credits Amazon would want to give you, but MacPorts is
a name with some pull, and Amazon has deep pockets. Couldn't hurt to ask?

Cheers,
Andrew

On 5/17/21 8:22 PM, Mark Anderson wrote:
> Yeah, I was thinking of the US as well, and I meant non-profit, which
> doesn't have tax deductible donations but is assumed to not make
> money. The problem is there is a lot of work around becoming a legal
> entity and accepting donations or whatever. I honestly have no idea
> how much work exactly - but certainly not zero. I have no idea how
> non-US entities work.
>
> —Mark
> _______________________
> Mark E. Anderson <mark at macports.org <mailto:mark at macports.org>>
> MacPorts Trac WikiPage <https://trac.macports.org/wiki/mark>
> GitHub Profile <https://github.com/markemer>
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 2:02 AM Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org
> <mailto:ryandesign at macports.org>> wrote:
>
>     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 <https://opensource.org/node/840>.
>     That's what I recall from researching the process in the U.S. It
>     may differ in other countries.
>

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