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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!
does this mean donations will be tax deductible?
Damn, I left my good sig in my other pants
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
No, obviously now it's:
1) fetch packages
2) compile
3) ???
4) !PROFIT
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.
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
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.
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/
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 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!
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.
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.