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Hi!
the annual debian conference (debconf5) will be hold in helsinki
next year. for it to work smoothly we need a legal umbrellar.
in the past local groups in favour of FOSS provided this support.
from a mail that i sent to the debconf5 organisational
mailinglist:
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we will need a legal and financial umbrellar to hold debconf5
under.
in the past this service had been provided by NUUG Foundation in
Oslo and the Free Software foundation with a long brazilian name
that i can not remember for debconf4 in POA.
these legal entities provided us with accounts to receive money
on and even extended money to us when we needed to pay bills
without having received sponsorship money yet. this situation is
not allways avoidable since large companies have awkward paying
cycles: 45 days it is for HP from the day they receive an invoice
to the day they release the money. all mix ups and errors restart
that cycle.
All the accounting was handled by these legal bodies, too. this
costs considerable time, money (the worktime of a professional
accountant) and nerves, and is some well hidden but very real
sponsorship.
requirements for such a legal body would be that it is local (to
helsinki) and is very benevolent towards free software in general
and debian specifically. having deep pockets (aka money) helps.
it should be able to receive big donations in a legal and
tax-free way, so it should be a non-profit (i guess, i dont know
finnish law).
is there such an entity in finnland/helsinki? can nokia provide
it? (nokia is non-profit, yes? :-)
one option is to have our own Debian Finnland Foundation (or so).
founding it takes time, and getting it to be a non-profit might
take even longer. we need it in place and able to receive money
by february or even earlier.
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could you please find out if linux-aktivaattori.org could help us
in this regard?
you are btw wellcome to join us on the DebConf5 Team
<debconf5-team@liw.iki.fi> mailinglist!
/andreas
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