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