On Friday 02 October 2009 14.48:41 Klistvud wrote:
> Besides, are you
> perfectly positively sure that adding "some margin for the Debian
> project" is consistent with the legal position of non-profits such as
> Debian?
Adding a margin to the purchase price is what we (debian.ch) always do when
selling shirts. And as to the legal side: selling stuff to raise money is
no problem. [1]
Note also that "Debian" does not have a legal status as such.
There's debian.ch, (where I happen to be on the board) and which is covered
under Swiss law. There's of course Debian SPI. A few others, too. So
what's the "legal position of Debian"?
But legally, I'd probably sell the Umbrellas -- if I go ahead -- as a
private person and just donate my profit to debian.ch (converting to USD and
donating to SPI just loses us money. It can still be moved around if we
need it somewhere else later on.) So the question of non-profit doesn't
even enter: I, as a person, don't have any non-profit status to maintain.
Obviously we (would probably need DPL approval) might decide to run this
project and have debian.ch take the risk, but I don't think that'd be a good
idea, but more for practical reasons than legally.
cheers
-- vbi
[1] not so short digression...
Relevant law in Switzerland starts at
http://www.admin.ch/ch/d/sr/210/a60.html; basically all formal Associations
have to be non-profit, but as long as you're not distributing profits to
members you can do almost anything. Example: many of the big football teams
are still "non-profit" associations. They obviously pay wages and have huge
budgets, but they're still non-profit in the sense that their aim is not
profits but running a football team. Likewise, some (quite big) insurance
"companies" legally were (non-profit) associations, and had members instead
of customers. (I don't know if any are left, I think they all reformed into
regular corporations.)
--
Compile with -wIngo.
-- tilladam in kmail's changelog
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