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Gentoo Officially Not-For-Profit
iswm writes "The paperwork for the Gentoo Not-For-Profit entity was approved by the State of New Mexico today. This means that as of today, the Gentoo Foundation is an official Not-For-Profit Corporation in the United States. The process of becoming a Federally-recognized not-for-profit entity, which will take about six months for approval, can now begin."
Remember that Gentoo now supports binary packages for those giant software such as KDE and OpenOffice.org. Also check the Wikipedia article about Gentoo.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
As far as Linux and Gentoo are concerned this can only be a good thing and it is certainly a very positive step. For those interested in finding out a bit more about what this actually means here are a couple of Wikipedia links:
Non Profit Corporations
Non Profit Organizations
I personally love Gentoo, hopefully now that they won't have to pay taxes and get other benefits they will be able to give the Gentoo users a little bit more, although they've been doing a great job so far. And for people who don't know what Gentoo is, since it's pretty popular but not everyone knows about it. It is a Linux OS that compiles most packages (except for open office, unless you're crazy, like me). Take a look at it here.
Hey, this makes them tax exempt.
In New Mexico.
The blurb was badly written. They are not tax exempt in the United States and the standards for state tax exempt status are usually somewhat different and easier (fill out the forms) than the federal standards.
About six months from now Gentoo may or may not be nonprofit in the United States.
KFG
Basically, being a NFP will relieve much of the money-making pressure on Gentoo, so they can fulfill their Social Contract, without having to compromise it so they can mmet some aribitrary profit targets imposed by shareholders and so.
NFP also is a testimony to their commitment on giving back to the community instead of giving to some high-profile exec or a limited bunch of anonymous shareholders.
In principle, it's a good thing, but let's see how they can get a cash flow going (not necessarily profit, but they should have at least the means to keep paying their bills on time).
That's inaccurate. We are a not-for-profit organization right now. Today. The Federal status (which is mainly for tax purposes) will take another 6 months to formally complete.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
It depends on what 501 status we pursue. 501(c)(3) organizations are considered "charitable" organizations and donations to these entities are tax deductible. 501(c)(6) is a trade organization and organizations to these entities are not tax deductible.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
I think there are several people that do not understand what a Not for Profit company really means. Not for Profit doesn't mean they do not make money it only means that they cannot have 'extra cash' on hand at the end of their fiscal year. They can still have money in savings because you can budget money into saving. Also at times, working for a NFP company can be a benifit since they can't have 'extra cash' then they sometimes pay really well.
Take Blue Cross Blue Shield (an American insurance company), they are actually a NFP organization. Most people don't realize this but it is true.
Art by Mindy Herman, my wife.
In order to be able to receive tax deductable contributions you have to apply to the IRS to be a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. The blurb on Gentoo.org doesn't say what section they're applying under, but it would be pretty surprising if the IRS granted them charitable status. It's usually reserved for charities, artistic or literary foundations, churches, etc.
Gentoo is for people that want the ease of use of Debian's apt-get with the benefits of source compilation (optimization for your specific machine, smooth integration with source compiled packages) and support for The Latest Stuff.
Gentoo is as easy to maintain as Debian, but it is generally more geared towards people that want the latest stuff on their desktops (whereas Deb is not very desktop-friendly). In comparison to the desktop distro crop (Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, etc.), Gentoo stands out favorably (IMHO) in that it is much more accessible and maintainable from the command line. This may scare noobs, but tweaking the ol' config file is a lot more deterministic and promising than dealing with dialogs like 'there was a problem with your network device' and with custom vendor kernel weirdness.
So, to sum it up: Gentoo combines the best of both worlds: it is a very hard-core, clean, unixy distro with a very refreshing attitude towards desktop usage. IMHO, the only thing that beats Gentoo on your desktop will be OS X!
They just can't pay a return on the money they make. They can disburse it charitably, reinvest it, etc. There is such a tough regimen of oversight in the American non/not-for profit. If only Enron and those evil fucks had to live by a 503's rules.
I used to run a non-profit environmental journal. We made money on occasion and when we had excess we had this nifty idea called: giving it to the poor. Problem is: that makes you a hell-bound commie in Merika.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Non-profit and not-for-profit can be used interchangeably. You will rarely hear any accountant refer to a company as non-profit. Not-for-profit is the current "politically correct" term.
In order for a not-for-profit to receive tax exemption it has to qualify under the IRS codes section 501(c). The most common being 501(c)(3) for charitable organizations.
We live in a climate and culture where a young man like Bill Gates can become unimaginably rich by first buying someone else's work and fobbing it off on the public, but where people of vision like Daniel Robbins nearly loses everything he has trying to bring to the public a product that will benefit everyone.
Donate to Gentoo, I did, and even if I gave them $100 a year, it'd STILL be a much better deal than if I was able to get Windows for free, forever.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J