new corporation to support Debian

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

I am in the process of forming a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation to
support Debian and act as a channel for donations. The corporation is
called "Software in the Public Interest". The purpose of the name is to
make the organization's purpose clear to the IRS and grantors.
I have asked Ian Murdock, Ian Jackson, and David Engel to serve on the
board of directors, and may ask others to become part of the board later on.
I will serve as director for a maximum of two years. I don't want to have
a president-for-life situation, which I think is the big problem with FSF.

There won't really be any change to the way we've been operating except
that we will have a mechanism to handle donations, we will actively seek
grants, and we may eventually be able to fund our net sites and subsidize
our developers. I want to stress the following current policy elements
that must be preserved:

We will continue to encourage authors to GPL their software, and we
will continue to feed bug fixes back to the upstream maintainers of
all software. This has always been our policy.

Debian will remain a free system. That means that a non-free program
can never be made an essential part of the system.

Participation in Debian is open to any organization, business, government,
or individual. There is no consortium or membership fee.

	Thanks

	Bruce Perens
--
                       *** Re-elect Clinton ***

Bruce Perens AB6YM          Bruce@Pixar.com            http://www.hams.com/