* Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org [31/03/06, 23:27:51]:
- Non-profit organization
There are many advantages to having a non-profit organization for a project, for instance to allow tax-exempt donations, or hold assets like trademarks. However it's a lot of paperwork to do, so we never went to the trouble of setting one up.
Now the SFLC is starting an organization called the Software Freedom Conservancy, that will be officially launched on Monday. It's basically an umbrella non-profit that provides services to free software projects. By joining that organization, we will get all the advantages of having our own non-profit, without having to do any of the work, so that seems like a good deal...
There will also be the possibility of assigning our copyrights to that organization, which would make it easier to enforce the license, and provide some liability protection for developers. However this will only be done if most developers are comfortable with it, so I'd be interested to hear your feedback on this issue.
I'm still unsure about this "assigning the copyright to someone else" thing. I'm living in the EU, where the copyright is split into "usage rights" and "creator's rights" and only the usage rights are transferable. I'm not into that legal stuff too much, so I'd leave that to experts to decide on, but I'd like to see a conclusive explanation on how this will apply to all of us new and old Europeans.
Cheers, Kai