Hi Rob, I think the problem is that ASF doesn't have a policy of "paying" for development. Additionally, monies that do come in through the Sponsorships is *not* earmarked for a specific project. There are currently no mechanisms to deal with this. At ConCom we've seen the Meetup communities raise money for specific events and ConCom is working to figure out best to support self-organizing targeted funding for events...but again this isn't the same as accepting donations for coding. If AOOo did this, it would be completely new (and IMHO the Board would have to agree to it).
There is the added dimension that the larger OOo/LO communities have long been accepting donation monies earmarked for specific things (such as SoftwareAG taking money to sponsor travel to OOo-related events). These have always completely separate from the "code copyright owner" and might be useful to divert donation inquiries towards. Good news is there are alternative well-established pots of money that donors can be directed to. Of course SoftwareAG is only tax-exempt in Germany, as the ASF is only tax-exempt in the USA... My $.02 Danese On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Rob Weir <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm seeing some members say on the ooo-users list that targeted > donations are not permitted at Apache. But a cursory investigation > calls this statement into question. > > For example, the contribution website at Apache [1] says, "If you have > a specific target or project that you wish to directly support, please > contact us and we will do our best to satisfy your wishes." > > And I see an old ASF Board resolution explicitly enabling the > acceptance of targeted donations [2]. > > What is the situation? Is this just what is true of any US-based > non-profit, that we can only officially accept official contributions > at the foundation-level, but that the Board does a best-effort attempt > to use the funds in a way that respects the donor's wishes? > > I don't think the project should solicit donations to the project > alone. Our project creates non-trivial load on infrastructure staff, > hardware and bandwidth, and that is best remediated by general, > unencumbered donations to ASF. But if someone came along and wanted > to donate specifically for the benefit of the project, would we really > be required to turn them away? > > -Rob > > [1] http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html#Financial > > [2] > http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/1999/board_minutes_1999_09_22.txt >
