Hi, Is oVirt Foundation (or will it be) an independent corporation with a 501(c)3 status? If so, will the foundation accept sub-project targeted donations? Will the foundation provide legal services for projects? I'm trying to understands the pros and cons of being a member project to help make a case for joining. Even if this isn't in place today or in the near future, if that's where things are heading, it would be useful to know. Regards, Anthony Liguori _______________________________________________ Board mailing list Board(a)ovirt.org http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/board

On 09/26/2011 03:27 PM, Carl Trieloff wrote: > > Right now we will not setup a foundation, however the goal as a > community is to provide support for subprojects, help direct > marketing etc. > > We can pretty much provide all the value for sub-projects without a > foundation. If we get to the point we believe we need a foundation to > better develop the ece-system we can create one, however based on past > experience I don't think we will need one. Can you elaborate on that? We're actually feeling pains from not having a foundation with QEMU. US tax law is complex and unforgiving so when it comes to thinks like accepting donations, a foundation is really needed. A concrete example is something like Google Summer of Code. As part of the program, Google pays each organization a small stipend which requires the organization to generate a purchase order. So you need some organization that can generate the PO, and then can also cover travel/pay out stipends. If any oVirt project decides to participate in GSoC, this will come up. There are similar problems in accepting donations from other organizations and/or trying to sponsor travel. Both Apache and Eclipse are 501(c)3 and 501(c)6 foundations respectively. Almost every other foundation has some sort of non-profit status too[1]. [1] http://flossfoundations.org/foundation-directory Regards, Anthony Liguori