Fedora as an crowd founded project an additional funding source to our sponsor

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2013-07-25 at 10:07 +0200, Brendan Jones wrote:
> On 07/25/2013 12:11 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 16:50 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> >> On 07/24/2013 04:40 PM, inode0 wrote:
> >>> On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:07 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"
> >>> <johannbg at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> The entire budget is not public so you won't get a definitive answer
> >>> for a large portion of the budget.
> >>
> >> Why is it not public any reason why we the community cannot know how
> >> much we cost?
> >
> > I don't think there's any particular reason, but one thing is that it's
> > not particularly obvious even within Red Hat: there isn't a single nice
> > clear Fedora Budget, money gets spent on Fedora out of all sorts of
> > other budgets. It may well be the case that *Red Hat* does not know
> > precisely how much money Red Hat spends on Fedora. :)
> >
> I contribute regularly to opensource projects (monetarily) with no 
> issue. While I take JBG's anti-RH implications with a grain of salt, he 
> has highlighted a lacking there. It *should* be easier to contribute, 
> although I cannot see this happening if Fedora is a legal entity resides 
> state-side.
> 
> To clarify, I think RH is an awesome sponsor, and the resources they 
> provide do separate us from other distros, and for that I am grateful, 
> BUT there needs to be another way to contribute

I think practically speaking the best way to achieve this would be to
establish some legal entity entirely separate from Red Hat and the
'Fedora project' - which as noted upthread, technically, has no
independent legal existence - to pay people to do whatever it is you
want them to do on Fedora. I mean, just set up a non-profit called
Coders' Collective, or something, let people donate to that, and have it
be an organization whose paid employees do work on Fedora. IANAL and I
am not acquainted with all the legal issues here, but from what I've
heard, that sounds like the simplest way to go. All the complicated
issues I've heard about are related to the question of having a legal
entity _which would in some way 'be' or at least have power over the
Fedora project_ - it's all about Fedora's trademarks, copyrights etc.
AFAIK there aren't any issues with setting up an organization which is
explicitly not that, but which just gives people who do work on Fedora
some money.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net