"Fred Benenson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Private" is confusing when used in conjunction with non-profit as > non-profit is necessarily an organization with no private equity. That is, > you cannot "own" a non-profit like you can own a private company. > > On the other hand, if by private you mean "closed to outsiders > participating" then you might have a point, at least with respect to ORG, > but I don't know enough about how they work to make a judgement.
Probably it is confusing. I'm not sure of the best terminology, but I'm not sure anyone else is. You cannot own a non-profit like a typical company, but you can keep tight control of it. I'm not 100% sure how ORG works because I didn't find their docs online, but I believe they're controlled by a self-perpetuating board. (Hiding governance details seems common for closed boards.) > Nevertheless, your point not generalize as there are many member driven > organizations with non profit status. Where? I think most free culture/e-culture non-profits I have seen (EFF, OKF, FFII, FSF) are driven by self-perpetuating boards, which is rather disappointing. One of the few counter-examples is Software in the Public Interest (SPI), the main non-profit support company for the debian project and others. > It should also be known that SFC is currently tracking towards non-profit > status. [...] Good luck with that. -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
