On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Don Stewart
Hello everyone.
The haskell.org committee[1], in the interest of the long-term stability of the open source Haskell community infrastructure, has decided to incorporate haskell.org as a legal entity. This email outlines our recommendation, and seeks input from the community on this decision.
The committee's proposal is that haskell.org incorporate as an entity under the Software Freedom Conservancy umbrella organization (the same group that Darcs joined recently):
If we proceed with this move, haskell.org will be a legal entity, and registered as a non-profit, allowing us to more directly accept (US tax-deductible) donations, and to invest in assets that benefit the Haskell open source community.
We welcome your feedback on the proposal attached below.
-- Don Stewart (on behalf of the Haskell.org committee)
Keeping -cafe and committee@ on the CC list. Joining the SFC looks like a good alternative to full-on incorporation, and having some sort of legal cover for operations involving money and ownership of infrastructure looks like a good idea. Which assets would move over to the SFC? The domain name? Any sort of hosting could then be leased by the SFC to whomever is doing this now. I'm a bit fuzzy here. They look pretty flexible, and are open to some, none, or all of a project's assets being in the name of the SFC. Antoine
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= A proposal for the incorporation of Haskell.org =
In recent years, haskell.org has started to receive assets, e.g. money from Google Summer Of Code, donations for Hackathons, and a Sparc machine for use in GHC development. We have also started spending this money: in particular, on hosting haskell.org itself. There is also interest in running fundraising drives for specific things such as Hackathon sponsorship and hosting fees.
However, haskell.org doesn't currently exist as a legal entity, meaning that these assets have had to be held on our behalf by other entities, such as Galois and various universities. This leads to tricky situations, with no-one being sure who should decide how the haskell.org assets can be used.
To solve these problems, we propose that haskell.org applies to become a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/. The SFC is a non-profit organization that provides free financial and administrative services to open source projects. Additionally, it has 501(c)(3) status, meaning donations from the US are tax-deductible. The SFC would hold haskell.org's money and other assets, and would be able to accept donations on behalf of haskell.org.
The haskell.org committee, as described here [2], will make decisions on spending assets and other decisions related to governing the non-profit.
Before proceeding, we are inviting input from the community in the form of specific objections or queries regarding the plan.
We've tried to answer some of the most likely questions:
Q: Does this mean that my Haskell project must now be covered by a copyleft licence such as GPL? A: No, but Haskell projects using haskell.org resource should use an Open Source licence http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical.
Q: Will it still be possible to use community.h.o to host non-open-source material, such as academic papers? A: An overall minority of such content, as is the current situation, is not a problem.
Q: Will it still be possible to have job ads on the haskell.org mailing lists and website? A: Yes.
Q: Will this affect our ability to host the Haskell Symposium http://www.haskell.org/haskell-symposium/ and Industrial Haskell Grouphttp://industry.haskell.org/ webpages within haskell.org? A: No.
Q: What will be the relationship between haskell.org and other organizations such as the Haskell Symposium and Industrial Haskell Group? A: Those organisations will continue to exist as separate entities.
Q: If an umbrella non-profit organisation "The Haskell Foundation" was created, would haskell.org be able to join it? A: Yes. It's likely that in such a scenario, the Haskell Foundation would become the owner of the haskell.org domain name, with the cost divided between the members. The entity that is part of the SFC would be renamed "community.haskell.org" in order to avoid confusion.
[1]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell.org_committee [2]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell.org_committee#Operation
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