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. I perfectly agree with the will of having the legal entity in US, but I think the process in Europe might be less expensive at least, probably faster. On Mon, 17 May 2021, 08:02 Ryan Schmidt, <ryandes...@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. > >
