Trevor Harmon wrote: > Again, I don't see why this is necessary. Fink, as well as all submitted > packages, are licensed under the GPL, which explicitly states there is > no warranty. And although that doesn't prevent someone from suing Fink's > developers, the chances of that happening are pretty slim, are they not? > I've developed and distributed several products under the GPL, but I > certainly don't lie awake at night wondering if someone's going to sue me.
I agree it's not likely to be a big deal, legal protection is more of a side-effect. Taking donations is our biggest impetus for doing this. > Nothing is said about why money is necessary and what it will be used > for. New computers for a build farm? Salaries for the core developers? > Even if there's a good reason, would donations even come? I suspect most > in the Fink community would rather provide time than money. In I would argue that our biggest problem is getting time from the community, we have few enough maintainers as it is, and the tracker languishes with packages that are incomplete or broken, and those with the knowledge to help those folks don't have the time (or patience to deal with the SF trackers) to help them. As for your question, yes to computers, more than anything else. Since we don't have the luck of the open-source webkit developers, we'll have to get stuff ourselves. <grin> Also, being able to have the money to send folks to WWDC, to get extra seed keys when new OS releases are coming out, that kind of thing. Anything to help us do more with what we've got. The only way we can give our existing maintainers more bandwidth is to give them access to faster machines and more resources. > particular, I'd rather we focus on structural and policy problems [1] > that are never going to be solved by throwing money at them. And even > then, let's say we all agree that Fink needs money and everyone has > money to donate. Is a corporation really the best way of handling this? > Don't SourceForge or PayPal provide a donation service without all the > extra overhead (the expense of hiring a lawyer and all that)? Yes, to some extent, but becoming a not-for-profit lets us take donations in a tax-exempt (and often deductible) way which makes it more attractive to the donators. It also gives us a framework to do more interesting things later. Think bigger than machines. What if we get enough support to do a FinkCon 2007, or, like you said, pay a salary so that some of us who "administer" fink could do it full-time? There are a lot of things that incorporating gives us the freedom to do, not-for-profit doubly so. -- Benjamin Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick http://ranger.befunk.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
