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

[Mark Anderson]

Something like the Software Freedom Conservancy was something I was hoping
existed - I don't know if anyone else has ever heard of them, but I bet
they could help.

Yeah, I was looking at mac1.metal instances which are surprisingly cheap
for macs, but still pretty expensive.

—Mark
_______________________
Mark E. Anderson <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 9:14 PM Andrew Janke <floss at apjanke.net> wrote:

> 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>
> 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>
> 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. That's what I recall from
>> researching the process in the U.S. It may differ in other countries.
>>
>>
>
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