Hi,
Greg Stein wrote on 2011-06-05 20.03:
That point has been repeaded over and over again, but basically you are
saying everyone "Do not set up your own foundation at all, we alreadyh have
enough."
I don't know that Robert B-D said that, or anybody else. *I* certainly
said it, and strongly believe it. But that's just me :-)
so, why don't the ASF, the Mozilla Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation
and the GNOME Foundation unite? :-)
Sorry for the provocative question, I just wanted to state "But we
already have a foundation" is no good argument for me. However, I think
the point why we hear these topics is another one, being some false
rumors spreading, so I hope I can clarify some things.
Ah! I didn't know that the current sponsor enabled that. Good stuff. I
had thought you were further away...
There is no Foundation as German legal entity yet, but we are right
before creating it. We have collected 50.000 € capital stock plus about
45.000 € in further donations, specifically for a donation in Germany.
Thousands of people from all over the world, developers, corporations
and especially many, many end-users, have donated. They want a
foundation, they want it in Germany, they want us to set this up -
otherwise I doubt they would have donated so much money in such a short
period of time. I think it's important to emphasize that most donors
have been individuals, so it's not that two or three corporations have
donated all the money.
Second is, we already have a well-established German entity. It's an
association, not a foundation, but the association has been in existence
since 2004. We have about 170 business and private members and have
basically taken care of many legal aspects of the German community so
far. Plus, we have supported international events, created
infrastructure, and we have organized two times a congress for business
and administration with about 100 participants each time, including
major players. With the legal backing of the association, we have
organized trade show appearences with partners and produced DVDs. Even
governmental entities, ministries and large corporations see us as one
of *the* point of contact for free office software in Germany. So, it's
not an unimportant little entity, but rather a powerful entity, with
existing governance, and we are publically acknowledged as non-profit,
and donations to us are tax-deductible.
So, in a nutshell, stating there was no entity able to handle things is
simply *WRONG*. It is no foundation yet, but that's about it. And, for
the foundation, we are close to setting this up, too. We expect to hand
in the statutes to the ministry the next week or the week thereafter.
This might not affect other topics, but honestly, I think the perception
of what already is in existence is not clear enough for many parties on
this list. :-) Hope I could shed some light on it...
Florian
--
Florian Effenberger <flo...@documentfoundation.org>
Steering Committee and Founding Member of The Document Foundation
Tel: +49 8341 99660880 | Mobile: +49 151 14424108
Skype: floeff | Twitter/Identi.ca: @floeff
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