On 10/19/2011 8:13 AM, Rob Weir wrote:
On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 4:20 AM, Ian Lynch<[email protected]> wrote:
This is a transfer of a discussion that started on the private list. It
started by considering the situation of TeamOO in relation to the ASF. Many
people over time have made small donations to TeamOO - some probably that
are philosophically opposed to the Apache license and are committed to LibO
or even something different. This leaves TeamOO in a difficult position in
terms of administering the funds they have. ASF policy is that money donated
simply goes to the ASF not to specific projects. Some would consider that
the ASF donations system is not very accessible to individuals wanting to
donate small amounts of money. This discussion is to explore ways of working
that fit ASF's charitable status and donations policy while enabling those
that want to make monetary contributions to OpenOffice.org to be able to do
so.
1. IMHO (and I have no omniscience here) the problem Team OpenOffice
has is that they are soon to lose the "contribute" link on
OpenOffice.org. Without that, their ability to raise funds is
drastically reduced. It really shuts off their funding. No one has
questioned what they did with the funds historically. It was all used
for the benefit of the community, or at least I've heard no one
suggest otherwise. But their business model, from a funding
perspective, was highly dependent on having a prominent "contribute"
link on the OpenOffice.org website, which receives a huge among of
traffic. So any suggestion that they can simply raise money on their
own, without that link and without the use of the OOo trademark, may
be technically true, but i practice I don't see how that could work.
2. We could substitute a link to make ASF donations. But my guess is
we would get a drastically smaller catch than the previous Team
OpenOffice link received:
I certainly hope to see progress ASAP on substituting a friendly link to
the ASF donate page, or even better, to an updated donate page that's
more appealing.
I agree (in a separate issue) that the overall ASF donation information
on the website is not simple enough for these kind of users. Luckily,
that's fairly easy to fix; the apache.org website is in the CMS system
and patches are welcome.
a) ASF has no European entity, so donations are not tax deductible as
charitable contributions in Europe (Is this true?)
This is a question for fundraising@ who can investigate.
b) We're not able to say anything to potential contributors about how
the donations would be used. All we can say is they will not be used
for the benefit of any specific project, i.e., the donations cannot be
targeted. We probably lose 90% of the donations right there.
One way out: Is there any way, with suitable disclaimers,and with
respect of the trademarks, that we can link to an external non-profit
organization, for those users who want to contribute to the larger OOo
ecosystem? A link that we put along the link to the ASF donation
page? Maybe as part of a link exchange, where they agree to link as
well to the ASF donation page?
Without knowing a lot more details, I my first thought is -1 on how
you're presenting that. I'd also imagine, from knowing many ASF Members
and all the current and recent directors pretty well at this point, that
the board would not approve what I think you're saying.
The policy of the ASF not directly funding development on our projects
is a strong one. I'm not saying that to be mean, I just want people to
understand that the idea of the ASF directly participating in
fundraising to pay specific people to code on our projects is not
something that (in my opinion) will ever happen.
I *could* imagine something less tightly coupled, where on the future
oo.o site we have a number of Links or Resources pages that point to a
whole host of well-behaved OOo related organizations, including Team
OpenOffice e.V. It certainly serves our mission of encouraging new
volunteers to become contributors to our projects - along with finding
new users for our projects - to have a strong ecosystem around our
projects.
Many existing projects have pages - properly labelled - that link to
various consulting groups, trainers, software companies, ISPs and the
like who provide services related to those Apache projects. I would
hope the AOOo PPMC would work with a number of the obvious organizations
around the OOo ecosystem to provide links to many of them in this way.
I hope I'm being clear here; the distinction of fundraising directly in
the ASF's name for a third party versus providing links to well-behaved
[1] third parties that provide related services to our projects is
subtle but important.
- Shane
[1] Well-behaved first requires respecting our marks, and providing
honest communications, and also presumes the services provided by the
organization are useful to users of the related Apache product.
-Rob
That is an attempt to summarise the discussion. If I got anything important
wrong or left anything out please comment accordingly.
--
Ian
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www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940
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