Daniel Mayer wrote: I like this approach---let the people giving the money decide where to spend it. We could have various funds: * A server fund * An advertising fund * A developer-compensation fund * A specific-software-feature bounty system * An administrative expenses overhead fund (office space, travel, etc.) * A print-version-expenses fund This would be a lot better, IMO, than going the normal route of non-profits and having a gigantic slush fund, which is both less transparent and engenders less donator confidence, especially given that over time a larger and larger percentage of the money in such slush funds tends to be siphoned off to things less and less directly related to the actual mission of the nonprofit. I know I personally don't donate to most non-profits, and advise others not to donate to them, because I know they eat a huge percentage of their budgets (often over 30%) in paying themselves salaries, plane tickets, restaurant meals, and so on. Documented transparent donations are another matter altogether: if people can donate $50 to a server fund, and be sure it will be used to buy servers rather than someone's lunch, that's much less shady. In the limited cases we've tried it, this seems to have worked out pretty well. If the Foundation had given Brion money to buy a notebook, that would've been a little bit questionable. It would've been defensible, given his enormous contributions to the coding and sysadminning and so on, but it still would've been questionable. But since instead people decided separately if they wanted to give their personal money to Brion to buy a notebook, then there's really no controversy, and everything is completely transparent and above-board. -Mark