This is a great suggestion. Thank you! It is definitely worth careful consideration.
-Travis On Oct 4, 2011, at 6:36 PM, Nathaniel Smith wrote: > [Does the group actually exist yet? Google says: "No groups match > fastecuhla." Replying here instead...] > > I've been following discussions around non-profit incorporation for > FOSS projects for about a decade (including some years on the internal > mailing list for SPI Inc. -- Debian's non-profit foundation). My > strong recommendation is that we not do it ourselves. Setting up our > own non-profit takes an immense amount of energy, and keeping it going > requires continuing to jump through annoying hoops on a regular basis > (you must have a procedure for selecting a board; the board must meet > on some regular schedule, achieve quorum, and regularly elect > officers; each board meeting must have minutes produced and approved, > you must file taxes on time, ...), and it's expensive to boot (you'll > need a professional accountant, etc.). As a result, most projects that > try going it on their own end up with a horrible mess sooner or later. > It works okay if you're, say, Gnome, but most projects are not Gnome. > > But fortunately, this is a solved problem: there are several > non-profit umbrella corporations that are set up to let experts take > care of this nonsense and amortize the costs over multiple projects. > The Software Freedom Conservancy is probably the most well put > together: > http://www.sfconservancy.org/overview/ > http://www.sfconservancy.org/members/services/ > http://sfconservancy.org/about/board/ > Many large projects with complicated legal situations like Samba, > Busybox, jQuery, Wine, Boost, ... have also chosen this approach: > http://www.sfconservancy.org/members/current/ > > TL;DR: When it comes to legal matters: starting your own non-profit is > to joining an existing umbrella non-profit as CVS is to git. (And in > fact git is also a SF Conservancy member.) > > My $0.02, > -- Nathaniel > > On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Travis Oliphant <teoliph...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> At the recent US SciPy conference and at other times in the past I have been >> approached about the possibility of creating a foundation to support the >> development of SciPy and NumPy. >> >> I know there are varying opinions about that, but I am generally very >> supportive of the idea and would like to encourage it as much as I can. It >> would be interesting to have a public discussion of the issues, but these >> discussions should not clog the main list of either NumPy or SciPy. >> >> As a result, there has been set up a public mailing list for discussion of >> the creation of a Foundation for the Advancement of Scientific, Technical, >> and Engineering Computing Using High Level Abstractions (FASTECUHLA). >> The list is fastecu...@googlegroups.com >> >> This is a place-holder name that can be replaced if somebody comes up with a >> better one. Please sign up for that list if you would like to contribute >> to the discussion. >> >> The items to discuss include: >> * where to organize >> * what the purposes should be >> * who should be members >> * where should money come from >> * what other organizations exist that we could either piggy-back on >> or emulate >> * what are the pitfalls on starting a foundation to support NumPy and >> SciPy versus other approaches >> * who has time to participate in its organization and maintenance >> >> One important feature is that I see this foundation as a service opportunity >> and obligation and not as a "feather-in-the-cap" or something to join >> lightly. I'm hopeful that it can be a place where people and organizations >> can donate money and know that it will be going directly to further the core >> packages for Scientific Computing with Python. >> >> Thank you, >> >> -Travis >> >> _______________________________________________ >> NumPy-Discussion mailing list >> NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org >> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion >> > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org > http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion --- Travis Oliphant Enthought, Inc. oliph...@enthought.com 1-512-536-1057 http://www.enthought.com _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
