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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."
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
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.
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/
How about charging people for Gentoo, making a profit on it, and creating wealth, instead of a non-quantifiable warm & fuzzy feeling?
Our software is GPL'd. You're welcome to pursue this. We chose a different path.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
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!