[OOTB-hive] Becoming a non-profit

[Richard Esplin]

As part of the discussion around BeeCon, I spent a little bit of time reading about what it would take to organize Order of the Bee so that it could accept money. Here are a few things I found:

* Organizing as a non-profit in the US requires incorporating on the state level ($100-ish dollars), and then filing for non-profit status with the IRS ($750). It probably requires a few days of paperwork. The IRS rejected non-profit applications from a few open source projects two years ago.

* I'm pretty good at filling out this sort of paperwork and willing to help out, but I won't be able to look at it until the end of August.

* Germany and Belgium seem promising for organizing as a non-profit around open source projects.

* OOTBee can become part of the Software Freedom Conservancy, Software in the Public Interest, or another foundation that exists to provide fiscal stewardship services to the open source community. But as the community organization for a commercial open source project, we might not directly fit their mission.

* I think CentOS has needs that are the most similar to ours. It looks like currently is it legally affiliated with Red Hat.

* We might be able to get some free legal advice from the Software Freedom Law Center, Free Software Foundation, or Free Software Foundation Europe.

* I'll get a sense for whether Alfresco would be willing to help OOTBee organize as a non-profit.

* I'll ask around at OSCON this week to see how other projects address these issues.

Cheers,

Richard