What do you think about this?
Maybe we could have a single 501(c)(3) to collect and benefit all the projects.
I looked into it years ago… you do need to charter the organization and hold annual board meetings.
Not sure any Foss photo youtuber gathers enough views to make a difference.
That’s true, but maybe it would be an additional motivation to try harder. If I know that in addition to trying to make software more popular, I can also support it financially without much effort, I also benefit myself by ensuring its further development.
I can imagine that software is also taken more seriously by the new potential users, because there is an organization behind it and is no longer seen as a playground of a few development enthusiasts.
I’d also mention that since Elementary OS got turned down for 503c status I haven’t heard of that many more being founded.
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Having an organization is overhead, especially in a foreign country. That may degenerate into profits going into admin rather than dev. Also the “follow YouTube’s monetization policies both on and off YouTube” is a shitty and abusive clause that basically gives them the right to unilateraly close your account even for stuff outside of their control/legislation.
All in all, we are already dependent on YT/GAFAM/Uncle Sam for the video sharing and monetization, I’m reluctant to deepen the dependency. Long live EU and its growing anti-GAFAM safety net.
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I believe the software productions involved here qualify as scientific endevours, which should be exempted from taxation. The exemplar since 1985 is the Free Software Foundation 501c3 who assist in developing and using free software. The mission statement touches upon many of the few 501c3 qualifying endevours. (The Computer Sciences is code U41 in the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities.)