Re: Proposed: Funding Open Source Accounting software

Hi MJ,

On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 02:01:58PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> > It's not an unrestricted donation.
>
> According to their web page: "Donations made are general donations to
> the Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc.,"
>
> Doesn't general donation == unrestricted?
>
> That's the only serious problem I have with this idea. Accounting
> systems in general are a long-running sore. The co-op is currently
> looking at extending Prometeo ERP,
> http://code.google.com/p/prometeo-erp/ but we have sadly no spare
> workers I can use to do a full published evaluation for quite a while.

Glad you're in support of solving the accounting system issue.

If you read the full bullet point from which you excerpted, it's clear that
they're committing to do this work, but don't want the donations to be legally
unusable if they're insufficiently funded. While I'm not a lawyer, I expect
their committment to use the funds as stated if they can while short of the
goal, and to make a complete good-faith effort if they meet the goal, is as
binding as these things usually are. Certainly they're going to act in good
faith, knowing them.

Even if there is some bizarre set of events where they can't make even slow
useful progress toward the goal and have to repurpose the funds, it's hard to
think of a set of exempt purposes more compatible with SPI's than
Conservancy's. At the very least this makes me quite confident of we won't
violate SPI's outbound transfer restrictions with basically any otherwise legal
donation from our general fund to Conservancy.

- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy(at)spi-inc(dot)org