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Gentoo Officially Not-For-Profit

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the call-jerry-lewis dept.

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."

4 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Non profit Corpoartion - what this actually means by JaF893 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Re:How about FOR profit? by zanderredux · · Score: 5, Informative
    Gosh, I had mod points but I'm giving them up so I can reply....

    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).

  3. Re:Um, so they're not for profit yet? by klieber · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/
  4. Re:Okay, a question... by irexe · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!