[samspenc]

I've wondered about this for a long time - can't a 501(c)3 non-profit hire open-source developers as employees, or easier, employ or fund them as contractors and pay them through a 1099?

I'm sure that non-profits hire for-profit companies or contract out work in some way, wouldn't that model apply to supporting open source projects through a non-profit?

[anticorporate]

In a nutshell, yes, but there are very few FOSS nonprofits with funding that allows them to do this. The Linux Foundation pays Linus, and I know the OpenInfra Foundation has a few technical roles on staff, but most simply don't have anywhere close to the money to pay for actual development. It's not a particularly attractive venture for corporate sponsors, or at least hasn't been historically, because they can spend the same money on their own developers and have much more control over what features and bugfixes get prioritized.

[reverius42]

It might be hard to justify the need for that software -- I don't think 501(c)3 orgs can do literally anything they want and keep their 501(c)3 status. The things they fund have to go towards a specific mission, and "putting more OSS into the world" might not be a valid mission (?).

[michaelt]

The PHP Foundation collects donations to fund maintenance and improvement to the PHP language, which is their charitable goal.

As far as I know, when you start a nonprofit there's no requirement that your nonprofit be particularly efficient or socially useful. You want to run a hospital that pays its CEO handsomely? Build a church in a town that already has plenty of churches? Organise international exchanges of frozen horse semen for a rare breed of horses? Run a college that charges $50k/year tuition? Pay for monks to just kinda hang out and vibe?

The IRS doesn't seem to require and proof those monks are measurably good for your immortal soul, or that there's widespread public support for horse semen exchanges, or that the college would be destroyed if they didn't have a football coach. The charity can just say "yeah we think the football team is, uh, good for student engagement, which serves our charitable goal" and the IRS goes along with it.

If a nonprofit college can pay a football team coach, the PHP foundation can certainly pay developers to work on PHP.

[ShaneCurcuru]

As noted elsethread, there are several 501(c)(3)s that pay for software development, either via having their employees/contractors do it (directly or indirectly), or by providing grants or one-off funding for specific kinds of work. It really depends on the organization what their policies are.

The LF has plenty of employees who help code on their various sub-foundations in one way or another. Python, NumFocus, PHP, and some others have grant programs to help pay developers to work on specific code. And Conservancy and SPI are fiscal hosts that allow their independent projects to fundraise and pay for their own work.

On the other hand, the ASF explicitly does not allow funding to pay for project development, at least not in the context of the ASF itself. The ASF does have a paid infra staff/contractors who do write code, but it's all to run infra, not for project releases.

As noted elsethread, it's all about what the charity was setup to do.

[mistrial9]

the mission of the 501(c)3 is defined in the original application for status. It is correct that spending has to be documented and related to the mission. There are more than a million 501(c)3 in the USA and the vast majority are small operations that are mission focused, and they do have to document and play by the rules, or face penalties or closure. That said, there is a "one percent" of non-profits who operate completely (mostly secret) structures and have for decades upon decades.

A primary reason to have a fiscal sponsor 501(c)3 -- and pay ten percent or more of income -- is that the paperwork is non-trivial each year.