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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."
Hey, this makes them tax exempt. Way to save money!!!!!
Evolution or ID?
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!
does this mean donations will be tax deductible?
Damn, I left my good sig in my other pants
Celebrate by Donating to Gentoo
Then how do they square the fact that it's used by Linus, Robbins, Stalman and all those other agents of God eh?
Will the government remove their not for prophet status if they discover how deep the OSS religion goes?
Beep beep.
Didnt take too long for the answer to emerge.
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
So what niche is Gentoo aimed at? Mandrake is for n00bs, Redhat's for suits, Slack is for people who have an unhealthy obsession with config files.
I've been looking for a new distro lately. Where does Gentoo fall in this list?
Love your country always, but respect your government only when it deserves it. -- Mark Twain
No, obviously now it's:
1) fetch packages
2) compile
3) ???
4) !PROFIT
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.
Why the rush and excitement over being able to say that you make no money? How about charging people for Gentoo, making a profit on it, and creating wealth, instead of a non-quantifiable warm & fuzzy feeling? I'm sure this will instantly be modded Troll, Flamebait, or Heresy, but I don't understand the pride people have in being able to declare that they make no money.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Repeat until funny.
Making these jokes is getting to be worse than the zealots who made the ill-advised compiler flag comments in the first place.
Gentoo is an impressive distribution, although admittedly it has its faults (find me a distribution that doesn't). I'm glad I got to experiment with it before it became fashionable to make derogatory jokes about it. Tthere's a fair chance all the +5 funny/insightful diminishing comments might have deterred me.
emerge --deep 501c
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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/
Good on you Gentoo team - I wish you every success.
I might even put my money where my mouth is onces it's tax deductable.
Any plans to do the same in Europe?
----
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.
Gentoo is a lot more sophisticated than most of my former employers, though.
They didn't get non-profitable status legally established until the bankruptcy hearings.
Another one giving up mod to reply...
The real problem is a hijacking of the concept of 'money'. 'Money' was originally meant to be a means of extended barter. You need a chicken, I need work done on my house, but I have spare corn instead of a chicken. We could find a third party that needs corn, and has a chicken. Or we could come up with 'money' that lets us extend our barter system into a marketplace, and allows all goods to become more liquid.
Unfortunately, for some people money has turned into a measure of self-esteem. They're not even collecting castles, or jet planes, or home theaters, or any sort of goods, any more. They measure their success by incrementing digits.
Also unfortunately, as much as we'd like to think of the economy as an expanding pie that has room for everyone to get as much as they want without depriving others, it just isn't. Though there is some expansion, the finite size of the pie is painfully apparent to many. In order for the more successful to tick their digits upward, they end up taking away from others. In other terms, this can be called 'downsizing', 'offshoring', 'making benefits competitive', and the like.
Why this use of money is bad is that it's so easy to tick digits upward. Had these people been accumulating toys and property, it would be more obviously outrageous.
The nifty thing about a gift economy is that it lets you measure your self-esteem through contribution. But it does need to piggyback on top of a money economy, because goods in the real world aren't free, and we all need to eat and get out of the rain.
Finding the balance between gift and money economies, and getting Joe 6pak to buy into that balance, is the task for TruenGenius.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
New Mexico is a gaping black hole that sucks people in and they never leave. I've had two friends move away just to come back here because this is where they found jobs.
Then of course there's all the other crackpots that live here, making Gentoo fit in real nice. Roswell's alien crowd, and the various hippy religious cults.
You can mod me down, but it's true.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Can Slashdot finally get a Gentoo icon now? One of these days you really think it should...
(insert joke that the Gentoo icon is still compiling here...)
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
except thats exactly what the blurb says
Would this mean that Gentoo could take over the world like Visa did?
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.
Says the person who has to filch files from another distro to get his working?
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
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
In order to be a corporation in the US you only need to incorporate in one state (Delaware being very popular for tax reasons). In order to qualify for tax exempt status (which is what they mean by federal recognition - the IRS) you have to qualify under 501(c).
Well, the folks at Debian are not very desktop-minded. This is actually what makes Debian such a fantastic server distro, but if you are more of a multimedia guy/gal it may be annoying. The Debian attitude has a number of implications for desktop users:
1. The community: Asking questions on #debian about your KDE install is likely to get you responses like 'bah! I don't use desktops. I use X occasionally, but I don't really use KDE. Read the manual!'. Since Linux is a DIY OS, this may be troublesome.
2. The apps: by the time I switched to Gentoo, I could emerge KDE 3.1, whilst deb stable was still at the ancient KDE 2. At that time, Unstable was severely broken because of the whole gcc versioning issue. In general, new desktop apps appear in Gentoo in a matter of days, even hours after a release, whereas Debian unstable is a lot slower and more conservative at adapting.
3. The features: Gentoo is a bit more friendly towards newer features as well. As an example, getting ALSA to work in Debian about 1.5 years ago was a big pain. Gentoo supported it ever since I switched. In fact, it was my main reason for switching. Gentoo had a clear ALSA installation Howto present and all core packages were in Portage.
The point I like to stress here is that these differences are a direct result of the Debian attitude towards desktop usage. Don't take my word for it, go out on the irc channels and talk to these people. They are not keen on new desktop features and getting the latest media player or desktop environment to work is just not on their agenda. That's cool, unless it is on your agenda. Then you might want to give Gentoo a spin.
I'm personally thankful that the "powers that be" at Gentoo have the "Gentoo GNU/Linux Social Contract". If you're running another distro you really need to check Gentoo out. Gentoo's future is quite bright.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
BTW, churches usually don't try to get 501(c)3 status, although the charitable organzations they run often do. See this FAQ for details.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
I use both Debian testing (Sarge) and Gentoo 2004.0, just recently installed (two different machines)
It's frustrating, because I have to choose one or the other; I like them both so much.
The thing I like about Gentoo is that it is much easier (some folks actually recommend) to keep current "piecemeal", which would be better for dialup. You can update one package at a time, or, more precisely, one package and its dependencies at a time.
Debian is sort of easiest (in my experience) to upgrade all at once, which, depending on the last time you upgraded your system, might require some serious downloading of stuff. There are many benefits, especially if you just want to do it and get it over with, to upgrading all at once, but this whole process is made significantly faster and easier if you have a fast connection.
I think Debian Sarge and Gentoo are both excellent, but if I had to use dial-up, I would be tempted to go with Gentoo because the upgrades are easier to do package by package, and I could just run an update to a package in the background every now and then. The command-line nature of emerge and the --pretend switch are extremely helpful in picking and choosing exactly what you want to update, port by port. And the forums, and the installation instructions are just downright wonderful.