Of course not. 501(c)(3) accreditation is the standard in the USA for legal purposes. Wikipedia has a good writeup if you want to know more about how "nonprofit" is usually defined:
Just because a place is called a "nonprofit" doesn't mean that they have no money, no savings and no employees. It would be nearly impossible to run any kind of organization that way and would ridiculously handicap what they could accomplish. No money, savings, employees or profit is pretty much the recipe for a failed startup, after all. Anyhow, the IRS link explains exactly what is and is not allowed.
They also need to show that they are doing work which is a public benefit. For example, several free software projects are set up as a non-profit foundation, and they need to convince the IRS that they are a public good, vs. a company trying to shelter under the non-profit umbrella.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nonprofit_org...
If what you want is more financial or tax-based information, though, I'd go directly to the IRS website:
http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id=96099,...
Just because a place is called a "nonprofit" doesn't mean that they have no money, no savings and no employees. It would be nearly impossible to run any kind of organization that way and would ridiculously handicap what they could accomplish. No money, savings, employees or profit is pretty much the recipe for a failed startup, after all. Anyhow, the IRS link explains exactly what is and is not allowed.