> Benefit Corporations: 1) have an expanded purpose beyond maximizing share value to explicitly include general and specific public benefit; 2) are required to consider/balance the impact of their decisions not only on shareholders but also on their stakeholders; and 3) are required to make available to the public, except in Delaware, an annual benefit report that assesses their overall social and environmental performance against a third party standard. Such report does not need to certified or audited by a third party, but use the standard as an assessment tool.
We opted against a non-profit because it's vastly easier to distribute funds quickly to projects under this structure (think Kickstarter – also a benefit corp) and because the IRS seems to deny charitable status for organizations that build open source software.
> Benefit Corporations: 1) have an expanded purpose beyond maximizing share value to explicitly include general and specific public benefit; 2) are required to consider/balance the impact of their decisions not only on shareholders but also on their stakeholders; and 3) are required to make available to the public, except in Delaware, an annual benefit report that assesses their overall social and environmental performance against a third party standard. Such report does not need to certified or audited by a third party, but use the standard as an assessment tool.
We opted against a non-profit because it's vastly easier to distribute funds quickly to projects under this structure (think Kickstarter – also a benefit corp) and because the IRS seems to deny charitable status for organizations that build open source software.