On 26.01.2017 17:34, A.M. Kuchling wrote:
On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 01:58:42PM +0100, Nick Coghlan wrote:
Software maintenance is a commercial support activity that is normally done for profit, so the PSF needs to be careful in how it approaches it to avoid getting in trouble with the IRS (public interest charities like the PSF operate under different taxation rules from trade associations like the Linux and OpenStack Foundations, and hence have a different set of constraints on their activities).
This only seems true if "software maintenance" in the above means something like "writing contracts and taking money to apply bugfixes within certain guaranteed SLAs".
If "software maintenance" = "paying someone a salary to apply bugfixes to an old branch", that activity seems to clearly fall into a 501c3's purview under the categorizations of "advancement of education or science" or "erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works". [*]
I mean, if funding software maintenance is illegal for a 501c3, then the FSF, Software Conservancy, Software in the Public Interest, Django Foundation, NumFOCUS, etc. are probably all illegal.
I agree with Andrew: while software maintenance is a great business model for some companies, it's certainly not an activity that may only exclusively done by for-profit entities (even though some of those companies might find that useful ;-)).
As long as we're not using software maintenance for some hidden political lobbying agenda, we're fine as PSF.
(At some point this thread probably needs to move to psf-discuss-public or whatever it is.)
Agreed as well, but for the PSF to get active in this area, we'd have to draft up a proposal.
Note that the PSF does have a fair amount of money in the bank, which would certainly be enough to contract developers for doing maintenance or development work, either for dedicated work (as was done in the past a couple of times), or continuously, provided the rates are reasonable.
The main problem the PSF has is not having enough human resources to provide project management or even oversight, so a lot of such funding activities depend on whether there are trusted people available who could take up these tasks on behalf of the PSF.
[*] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/exempt-pu...