Gentoo Officially Not-For-Profit

iswm writes "The paperwork for the Gentoo Not-For-Profit entity was approved by the State of New Mexico today. This means that as of today, the Gentoo Foundation is an official Not-For-Profit Corporation in the United States. The process of becoming a Federally-recognized not-for-profit entity, which will take about six months for approval, can now begin."

donations

[PimpbotChris]

does this mean donations will be tax deductible?

Celebrate

[Anonymous Coward]

Celebrate by Donating to Gentoo [paypal.com]

Okay, a question...

[WhiskerTheMad]

So what niche is Gentoo aimed at? Mandrake is for n00bs, Redhat's for suits, Slack is for people who have an unhealthy obsession with config files.

I've been looking for a new distro lately. Where does Gentoo fall in this list?

How about FOR profit?

[Gothmolly]

Why the rush and excitement over being able to say that you make no money? How about charging people for Gentoo, making a profit on it, and creating wealth, instead of a non-quantifiable warm & fuzzy feeling? I'm sure this will instantly be modded Troll, Flamebait, or Heresy, but I don't understand the pride people have in being able to declare that they make no money.

Re:no more taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a significant difference between a "not-for-profit" and a "non-profit". In particular, not-for-profits are _not_ federally tax exempt.

I'm not aware there is much difference between a for-profit and a not-for-profit from a tax perspective.

Any CPAs around?

Less negativity please!

[barcodez]

Good on you Gentoo team - I wish you every success.

I might even put my money where my mouth is onces it's tax deductable.

Any plans to do the same in Europe?

I've worked at a lot of non-profit startups

[tjic]

I've worked at a lot of non-profit startups.

Gentoo is a lot more sophisticated than most of my former employers, though.

They didn't get non-profitable status legally established until the bankruptcy hearings.

Re:Gentoo better Desktop distro than Debian?

[irexe]

Well, the folks at Debian are not very desktop-minded. This is actually what makes Debian such a fantastic server distro, but if you are more of a multimedia guy/gal it may be annoying. The Debian attitude has a number of implications for desktop users:

1. The community: Asking questions on #debian about your KDE install is likely to get you responses like 'bah! I don't use desktops. I use X occasionally, but I don't really use KDE. Read the manual!'. Since Linux is a DIY OS, this may be troublesome.

2. The apps: by the time I switched to Gentoo, I could emerge KDE 3.1, whilst deb stable was still at the ancient KDE 2. At that time, Unstable was severely broken because of the whole gcc versioning issue. In general, new desktop apps appear in Gentoo in a matter of days, even hours after a release, whereas Debian unstable is a lot slower and more conservative at adapting.

3. The features: Gentoo is a bit more friendly towards newer features as well. As an example, getting ALSA to work in Debian about 1.5 years ago was a big pain. Gentoo supported it ever since I switched. In fact, it was my main reason for switching. Gentoo had a clear ALSA installation Howto present and all core packages were in Portage.

The point I like to stress here is that these differences are a direct result of the Debian attitude towards desktop usage. Don't take my word for it, go out on the irc channels and talk to these people. They are not keen on new desktop features and getting the latest media player or desktop environment to work is just not on their agenda. That's cool, unless it is on your agenda. Then you might want to give Gentoo a spin.

Profit in support not selling bits ...

[pherris]

IMO I think the traditional "for profit" software business model just doesn't work for GNU/Linux distros. What I'd like to see is Gentoo move into the "pay for phone support" business. Got a question you need answered now? Pay us $75USD and we'll help. Questions and answers can be read on a website so everyone benefits. There's profit in it while bring cash in to support an excellent distro. It's possible that $75 could be written off as a donation (kinda like "underwriting" on public radio/tv).

I'm personally thankful that the "powers that be" at Gentoo have the "Gentoo GNU/Linux Social Contract" [gentoo.org]. If you're running another distro you really need to check Gentoo out. Gentoo's future is quite bright.