On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 18:48 -0400, Brion Vibber wrote:
[Offering paid support] may or may not require some corporate restructuring; can the non-profit operate such stuff? cf Mozilla etc.
I am not a lawyer, but I would think some of the same issues Mozilla had would apply. Christopher Blizzard lays it out really well in his blog:
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=19
In particular, this part:
Under non-profit tax law there are various kinds of contributions that you can accept. Individual donations, corporate donations, etc. Tax law lays out tests to determine if you are a non-profit: certain types of revenue that come from various sources and are the result of different kinds of activities have to meet certain percentage requirements. We've got some relationships that create revenue that at some point in the future might make it difficult for us to maintain our non-profit status based on those tests. Those relationships have given us the resources to make Firefox and Thunderbird successful so we didn't think that it would be right to our users and our community to end those relationships. At the same time, our non-profit status is very important to us. We didn't feel it was an option to give that up either.
So, conceivably, Wikimedia Foundation might be able to get away with offering support contracts, without change. However, if the total of those support contracts started to make up a significant component of the revenue of the foundation, a restructuring would probably be in order.
My understanding with the Mozilla Foundation was that they were already getting a pile of money from Google, Nokia, and others for which there was a little too much quid pro quo for too much of their revenue, so they needed to act. I'm guessing WF doesn't have that problem yet.
Personally, I've done a little MediaWiki consulting, and have been toying with the idea of offering a standardized paid support option myself, but I'm unsure if the market is ready for that yet.
My question for the list: if such an option were available, would there be customers for it?
Rob