Hello Katherine,
Katherine Mcmillan wrote on Tue, Aug 29, 2023 at 11:43:21AM +0000:
> I'm wondering if there are any registered charities (in Canada,
> or frankly, any country!) dedicated to promoting/supporting OpenBSD?
I think you severely underestimate the complexity of charity law here.
You claim that Canadian law distinguishes two classes of organizations
that could broadly be regarded as charities, namely, "non-profits"
and "recognized charities". I cannot say whether that is accurate,
but both the number of such classes and how they are defined vary
widely from country to country. For example, in Germany, there are
three classes rather than two classes - namely, organizations "for
public interests", "for charity", and "for state-recognized religions".
The goal of "supporting the development of free software" in itself
would not fall into any of these categories, nor would the goal of
"promoting the use of free software". An organization similar to
the OpenBSD Foundation might still have a chance to get recognized
as "in the public interest" in Gemany if it argues that its main
goals are "research in computer science" and "education", but getting
that status would involve proving that in written form and submitting
documents as evidence to the appropriate German authorities. I know
more than one of the Directors of the OpenBSD Foundation personally,
and even without asking them, i feel quite confident in saying that i
consider it unlikely that they would want to spend any work on that -
not even cosidering that very likely, it would be necessary to adapt
the Bylaws of the foundation to better agree with German law, which
in turn might possibly provoke new conflicts with Canadian law.
The above complexities are why most large charities set up their
own charitable organization for (almost) every country they operate
in. There are much more than a hundred countries in the world.
That's more than OpenBSD has developers.
Note that one goal in setting up the OpenBSD Foundation was to shield
developers from being distracted from the work they want to do, and
instead be able to simply point people to asking non-technical questions
about funding to the Directors of the OpenBSD foundation.
Consequently, i think it would be more productive for you to ask the
Directors of the OpenBSD Foundation in private whether they think
there is any problem in the area your are talking about, and whether
they think you can help solving it, rather than starting a public
discussion. Be aware that, if the answer should happen to be "no" -
i honestly don't know whether it will - that would be good news.
Not having a problem is always good, isn't it? There are so many
other things in the context of OpenBSD one could work on.
By the way, in March 2022, you said you were interested in contributing
code to the OpenBSD project, and i provided specific advice regarding
your questions to you, because people working on the code are always
welcome. Did you make any progress with anything you planned or
with anything i suggested in my private mail to you dated 20 Mar 2022
21:34:11 +0100 ? I'm sorry if i missed your reply, that sometimes
happens with all the mail flying around...
Yours,
Ingo
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