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Ask HN: Establishing an open source project organization

5 points by moeadham ↗ HN
We are a start-up who makes extensive use of an open source library. This library is somewhat new, and is not yet established.

We would like to assist with the ongoing development of the project through both financial and engineering resources; we are unsure how to do so, given the lack of a formal organization.

We do not mind setting up a "non-profit" or other type of structure, but are unsure of how these legal entities look. Can someone suggest a good framework or a similar project we can look to for inspiration?

3 comments

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jonafato
Can you elaborate on your post? It's currently a bit vague.

There are many examples of organizations created to support open source software: the DSF (https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/), the ASF (https://www.apache.org/foundation/), and the GNOME Foundation (http://www.gnome.org/foundation/) are a few prominent ones. Are you sure you need this level of formality at this point, though? This carries a certain amount of overhead, and if you mean 501(c)(3) when you say "non-profit", it's a long process that may not go well (http://blogs.gnome.org/jnelson/2014/06/30/the-new-501c3-and-...).

It sounds like you're talking about a relatively new project with a small number of contributors. Would it be possible instead to make an arrangement with the core developer(s) to support the project financially? You may be able to structure this as a normal contractor agreement or via services such as Gratipay (https://gratipay.com/, formerly gittip) or BountySource (https://www.bountysource.com/). This would allow you to contribute while deferring the overhead of an organization until there are more people and resources involved.

moeadham
It is a smaller scale project, in the sense that it is not worth setting up a foundation of that scale due to the overhead.

We would like to support the developers, but it becomes complicated due to invention assignments when we take them on as contractors. We would also like to have it where more than one company can contribute, as a number of other startups are interested in participating, which makes contractor agreements complicated.

We will have a look at bounty source. It is simply because we would prefer to have these as accounting donations (not necessarily charitable), but that becomes difficult, as you have to donate to something.

jonafato
Regarding assignment, you're not required to have a work for hire agreement in place, and if you do, there's nothing stopping you from releasing code that you own and paid for under the open source license of the project. Take a look at Django's contributor license agreement (https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/cla/) as well, as it may be a useful construct in your work. Gratipay may make sense here if you're looking to fund general development toward a specific contributor, where as BountySource is a more feature-specific. If you do decide to go the non-profit organization route, your contributions now will be deductible if / when 501(c)(3) status is granted (http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable-Organi...). Either way, your best bet is probably to reach out to the developer behind the project to discuss the details.