[dpl-helpers] Proposed first draft for TO definition. (More of a braindump)

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

[ re-sent, after alioth outage ]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 01:39:01PM -0500, Brian Gupta wrote:
> To be clear the goal here is not necessarily that donations to Debian
> are tax deductible for the donor, but rather that donations (that
> aren't immediately spent) are not taxed as income.

Oh, right, thanks for the clarification. I did in fact misread this in
your previous post. I agree this is aspect is more important than tax
exemption.

> I believe though, with the final bullet clarifying that DPL still has
> the discretion to make decisions, none of this criteria are "hard"
> requirements, and exceptions can be made, if the DPL feels it is in
> the best interest of the project.

Fair enough. So, maybe, in view of a final text of the guidelines for
accepting TO, we should probably have an introductory paragraph before
the bullet list of "requirements", explaining that these are all
desirable features for wannabe TO, and that the DPL will decide on the
basis of how many of them / how much they are adhered to.

> Agreed and not-agreed. :) While I believe that historically working
> with organizations that are umbrella orgs was the correct decision for
> the time, I'm somewhat coming around to the feeling that Debian is a
> large enough project, that new TOs, should probably be Debian focused,
> and suspect that influenced my proposed numbers.

I guess we disagree on this then, but given the fact that these are all
"nice to have", that's fine :)

(In case you're interested in the larger debate: I think that
project-specific TO are doomed to fail, because being a FOSS "fiscal
sponsor" offering decent quality of service is a *huge* job. I
understand why we've created Debian-specific orgs in the recent and
not-so-recent past, but I think in the long run those orgs can't really
do what Debian really needs. Only larger orgs, serving multiple projects
possibly with paid personnel and the like, will be up to it. YMMV.)

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader  . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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