[members] Message from the Chairman

[Allison Randal]

On 04/28/2013 02:03 AM, Gerd Pokorra wrote:
> I would like to suggest to add "sourceforge.net". It might be a place to
> host Parrot as a non-profit entity.

Ah, I should explain better. At the moment Oregon State University's
Open Source Lab hosts the parrot.org website, the Parrot mailing lists,
and the download servers for the Parrot source tarballs, and GitHub
hosts the source control for active development. No matter what happens
with the Parrot Foundation, these "physical" or "technical" hosting
arrangements will continue.

The only thing the Parrot Foundation provided is "legal" and "financial"
hosting. So what we're looking for is a legal entity who can own the
copyright of Parrot and can receive and distribute donated money for the
Parrot project. USA law dictates that a non-profit foundation can only
hand off money and code to another non-profit foundation, so that limits
our options. (It makes sense if you think about it, they don't want you
to develop a successful product without paying taxes, and then suddenly
give that product to a company who will make a huge profit on the work
that was funded by un-taxed donations. It would be a sneaky way of
avoiding taxes.) And really, it's good for the Parrot project to have
funds going through a non-profit foundation anyway, because we want to
be able to use *all* the donated money, and not have half of it eaten up
by taxes. (The fact that Parrot Foundation has to pay taxes now is one
of the big reasons for closing it down. It's a huge waste of Parrot's
limited resources.)

Sourceforge offers physical/technical hosting, but doesn't offer the
legal/financial hosting we need to replace Parrot Foundation. The other
possible candidates after Software Freedom Conservancy are Apache
Software Foundation, Software in the Public Interest (hosts Debian and
Postgres), or maybe Mozilla Foundation. But, we haven't talked to any of
these foundations, so it doesn't really make sense to put them on the
ballot yet. I added the "Some other non-profit entity" option as a way
of saying "I don't like TPF of SFC, so keep looking".

Allison