On 26 January 2017 at 17:34, A.M. Kuchling amk@amk.ca wrote:
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.
Note that I said the PSF needs to be careful in how it approaches the question, not that it can't do it at all.
Problematic: "Commercial and other institutional end users are worried about a lack of developer time being invested in maintaining long term support branches, so the PSF should commit to funding that directly" (this is the motivation where I believe the answer should be "Pay a vendor for commercial support and tell them to work more actively on the sustainability problem")
Entirely fine: "The core development community have submitted a grant request to fund a dedicated part-time contract role for X months to facilitate issue triage, patch reviews, and mentoring of potential new core developers"
The latter motivation is about supporting the community and facilitating its growth, which is entirely in line with the Foundation's public interest mission.
Cheers, Nick.