Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 18:48:06 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Jacques Vidrine <nectar@communique.net> Cc: Terry Lee <terryl@ienet.com>, Dave Andersen <angio@aros.net>, stable@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: -Stable, credit card donations to FreeBSD, Inc. Message-ID: <22231.834457686@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 10 Jun 1996 19:55:26 CDT." <Pine.WNT.3.92.960610195043.-954989I-100000@jav.communique.net>
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> OK, so what's enough money? > > Let's say that one could come up with an answer. Then take pledges ... > when the pledges get there, then get the bookkeeping done, and collect on > the pledges! Ummm. Forgive me, but this is all moving just a little too fast for me.. :-) I think that in all of our enthusiasm of talking about money and user- supported services, we've skipped some really important steps along the way and are currently headed straight for grief. What is everyone paying for here, exactly? Why are we collecting this money? What exactly are we going to do with it? How much do we need? These are all questions we should be asking BEFORE we ask "how do we collect it?" since that is, in fact, the LAST question we should be asking. I really don't just want a bunch of people to drop money into a bank account without clearing this stuff up first. Sure, a few checks will already be arriving just due to the fund-raising noise that's been made so far, and that's fine - they'll be duly deposited into the account in hopes that many more will join them and we'll be able to do Good Things(tm) with all that money. However, before we start putting in "click here to charge your VISA" buttons on web pages and getting WC involved, I must insist that we come to some collective decisions about which goals are realistic and which are not, what services the users can expect to be provided, so on and so forth. Everyone's very eager to get right into things, and I respect that, but let's not let our enthusiasm color our judgement here or we'll blow our shot entirely (and I've seen it happen). Here are my thoughts on a possible future scenario: I've previously stated that FreeBSD, Inc. could be turned non-profit in the future with a 2-year backdating of donations, something which looked attractive at the outset but I'm now beginning to have some serious reservations about doing. I think FreeBSD, Inc. has to stick to tangible services for now or its lack of non-profit status will simply work against it, rather than working to its potential advantage. Yes, being a for-profit company *does* have certain advantages and it was, in fact, always our intent to create two organizations, one non-profit and the other for-profit. I simply created the latter first due to the far lesser degree of headache involved. A non-profit company has to be _extremely careful_ about the kinds of "business" it engages in or the IRS will yank that status away faster than you can say "deficit spending." It would be impossible, for example, to provide paid tech-support with a non-profit org (this is what my corporate lawyer says and I'm going to believe him, so you armchair paralegals out there can keep the counter-arguments to yourselves :-). Since starting the freebsd.org entity for those who really do need the tax write-off is also going to cost some money, I guess FreeBSD, Inc. can try to do some immediate fund raising for bootstrapping the creation of FreeBSD.org and perhaps giving it enough money to get its first newsletter out (which would be absolutely crucial to generating more dues-paying members!). I'd like to think of the model of FreeBSD.org as being similar to the USENIX organization - paid dues, regular and professionally produced newsletters and a conference a year once that seems warranted. FreeBSD, Inc. can then focus on the areas in which people would like to have some sort of paid hand-holding and/or special project work done. In the short term, I could pay people on a consulting basis to man the special support mailing lists and/or do custom project work. I'd also like to evolve FreeBSD, Inc's model as something close to Cygnus Support's. It wouldn't hold back any proprietary changes to FreeBSD, nor would it be considered to be engaged in proprietary work in general, it would simply offer some sort of more or less guaranteed response (within the limits already set by industry :-) to problems or give you a place to go if you needed something done specific to your individual needs. Maybe the users don't want tech support and it'll turn out that the non-profit side of this should be created sooner rather than later (with FreeBSD, Inc. placed into mothballs after making a donation of all its assets to FreeBSD.org), but that'll all have to come out of the discussions. Since I think we've also received more than enough debate on the -stable list concerning this topic, I'd like to ask that you please NOT continue the discussion there. If you've some specific suggestions to make concerning how you'd see this working, please send them to me personally and I'll raise them in our core group. We in the core group also need to discuss this a fair bit since it's been, as I said, a "sleeper" issue up to now and we haven't really given it a lot of in-depth thought. Give us some time to react to all this, please, don't just send us so much email about it that we spend all of our time reading the email and not discussing what we're going to do! :-) Jordan
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