[Board] [EXTERNAL] Re: Project sponsoring

[Daniel Morissette]

It's probably a grey area. It's fine when you consider that a code sprint 
is an educational and networking activity. Devs who do some coding do it on 
their own time. All that osgeo provides is a venue and coordination to 
foster cross project collaboration. education of new users and contributors 
to open source methodologies, and networking of domain experts to allow 
them to advance science.

That's my interpretation fwiw :)

Daniel


On February 21, 2016 2:43:15 PM Michael Smith 
<michael.smith.erdc at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wouldn't funding code sprints also fall into this category?
>
> Michael Smith
> Remote Sensing/GIS Center
> US Army Corps of Engineers
>
>> On Feb 21, 2016, at 2:38 PM, Daniel Morissette <dmorissette at mapgears.com> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2016-02-21 2:30 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>>> Daniel,
>>>
>>> It was my understanding that this was prohibited as a 501c3 as we would be 
>>> able to receive pre tax funds and using tax exempt funds was the issue. As 
>>> a 501c4, this is all post tax money so it shouldn't matter. The IRS concern 
>>> was companies spinning off software development to foundations and funding 
>>> them with tax exempt money.
>>
>> I hope I'm wrong, but that was not my understanding. I'd suggest you talk 
>> to either Alan or our attorney or another tax specialist to confirm that 
>> your reasoning is valid before you proceed to re-establish the project 
>> sponsorship program.
>>
>> Please note that I just added to the wiki page two more documents from our 
>> attorney that discuss this in more details. Those were shared with the 
>> board at the time but that was already a few years ago, an they were not 
>> linked to the wiki page until just now:
>>
>> https://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/board/irs_docs/OSGeo-IRS-attorney-advice-and-suggestions-20121029.pdf
>>
>> and
>>
>> http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/attachment/5072628/0/OSGeo-IRS%20advice%20and%20suggestions-2.pdf
>>
>> --
>> Daniel Morissette
>> http://www.mapgears.com/
>> T: +1 418-696-5056 #201
>>
>> http://evouala.com/ - Location Intelligence Made Easy