Re: [gentoo-project] Questions for Gentoo Council nominees: Gentoo Foundation

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 7:26 AM Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Nobody knows yet. Different umbrellas work differently. Different CPAs
> charge differently and perform different scopes of work.
> The Foundation will need to perform a value judgement based on
> quotations not beliefs.
>

My understanding is that most of these will either take a percentage
of donations for internal operations, or will accept donations
separately to fund internal operations, or both.

I suspect that the cost will be significantly less simply due to the
standardization and volumes involved.  Plus most of these are 501c3 so
they don't have to pay taxes for most things, and of course US
taxpayers can further deduct whatever they do contribute (though with
the recent increase in the standard deduction this benefit is going to
be much less universal than it was a few years ago).

However, I think Gentoo really should think about ways to go a step
further and minimize its reliance on owning stuff in the first place.
It is nice that we have all these donated hosts and volunteers to
maintain them, but as we depend on all this stuff we increase our
exposure to harm when somebody threatens to take that stuff away.
Distributed technologies like git greatly help to reduce these risks
as it makes our data much more portable - it would be nice if at some
point somebody came up with something similar for some of our other
needs, starting with bugzilla (which is always the first thing that
comes up anytime we talk about using a service like Github, and for
good reason).

-- 
Rich