Becoming a legal entity and accepting donations

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 17, 2021, at 06:13, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On Mon, 17 May 2021 at 10:39, Ruben Di Battista wrote:
>> 
>> Just as a side note, here in France I just created a non-profit association for a project I'm working on related to the organization of an event, and the process is almost free and reasonably fast. In a matter of few weeks we had the association published on the official governmental gazette and a bank account, also free of keeping charges.
>> 
>> Same thing in Italy.
> 
> We have a non-profit in France and I would say that it's
> extreeeeeeemely easy to run one there compared to almost any other
> country.
> The only downside is that one needs a person physically located there
> who's willing to do some stuff occasionally, but it's orders of
> magnitude less paperwork than in any other country that we
> investigated about.
> 
> In Italy it gets a bit more complicated in my opinion (but still quite ok).
> 
> Another huge benefit of having an org in Europe is that organizing
> meetings in Europe is much easier and cheaper with an European bank
> account.
> (That said, with Covid and everything, I'm not sure how likely we are
> to organize further in-person meetings any time soon.)
> 
> If we are to organize a meeting here in Europe, having a legal entity
> in the USA hardly helps. It's expensive to collect money for the fee,
> and also expensive to pay the hotel & other costs. Also, signing any
> contracts with the accommodation facility becomes a lot more tricky.
> 
> (Last time we organized the meeting via an Italian non-profit.)
> 
>> I perfectly agree with the will of having the legal entity in US,
> 
> It's also perfectly fine to run two non-profits in two countries at
> the same time. But of course each one brings its own time commitment
> and real costs (bank account etc.).
> 
>> but I think the process in Europe might be less expensive at least, probably faster.
> 
> I believe that we discussed a while ago that having a non-profit in
> the US would cost us some 1000 USD just for the bookkeeping or so (not
> sure whether that price was per year or per month, but either of those
> is a non-trivial amount of money unless you really have a lot of
> income).
> 
> In France we simply have board members that do all the roles on a
> volunteer basis.
> Of course, if we had a large traffic (lots of donations and expenses)
> that might not have been viable, but then we could also easily afford
> to pay for one.
> The important part is that it's easy enough to do the job that one
> doesn't need to be a trained professional to do it.
> 
> (What I'm slightly more worried about is the manpower to run a
> non-profit, no matter how little work that is.)

I know you've suggested starting the MacPorts entity in Europe before. Maybe others disagree, but I personally would prefer for MacPorts to be a U.S. entity. Apple is a U.S. company, and the U.S. is a big country, and my assumption, though I don't have data to back it up, is that most Mac users are located in the U.S. Therefore to make it easiest for U.S. Mac users to donate to MacPorts, having a U.S. entity would be preferable.

Your reasoning about ease of supporting a European MacPorts meeting doesn't convince me. There have been MacPorts meetings in Europe before, yes, but there's no reason why there might not also be MacPorts meetings in other countries. And though we have before, there's no particular reason why MacPorts should financially support any IRL meeting of MacPorts users. This latest discussion about becoming an entity arose because we are discussing accepting donations for the purchase of hardware or cloud services to support our build infrastructure. A message in this thread posited that we would not be able to collect enough donations to cover such costs. If that's so, and if we want to allocate what money we do have toward infrastructure, then we wouldn't have extra money to support future meetings.

I don't see any value, especially at this point of not having any entity, of considering starting multiple entities in different countries.

In my previous message about the difficulty of starting a non-profit, I think I left out that I was thinking of a 501(c)3 tax-deductible non-profit. It's certainly easier to start an entity and just call it a non-profit without it being tax-deductible. And working to gain tax-deductible status, if that's possible for us, is something that could happen later.