Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return [LWN.net]

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 17:21 UTC (Mon) by no_hope (guest, #44983)
Parent article: Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

I think they mean that the Gentoo Foundation's non-profit organization charter has been
revoked. This means that legally Gentoo Foundation is a nonentity now. Not sure what the
practical implications are though.

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Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 17:47 UTC (Mon) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link] (3 responses)

In Illinois at least, you have to be almost actively irresponsible to 
disincorporate a nonprofit. They give you several months warning, and the 
late filing fee is less than ten dollars. And I've heard the IRS is 
similarly forgiving. I guess their assumption is that if a nonprofit 
screws up, its incompetence, but if a for-profit screws up, its malice. 
Because if you were competent, you'd be in it for the money. /sarcasm

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 14, 2008 18:02 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

If you don't have day-to-day operations, and so you don't have physical space and a postal
address that belongs to the organization, and most of the trustees lose interest in some way
or other, and you don't do business by postal mail routinely, it wouldn't be too hard to
become unreachable by the state indefinitely without realizing it until the state does
something publicly visible and somebody happens to notice.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 15, 2008 18:20 UTC (Tue) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link] (1 responses)

If you're a corporation, non-profit or not, you are required to have a Registered Agent with a
physical address to not only receive mailings, etc., but also to be the person to whom court
papers are served (i.e., in case they are sued and the paperwork has to be hand-delivered to a
human).  So regardless of Robbins' message, it sounds like the people running the Foundation
were not doing a very sound job of it.

Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

Posted Jan 15, 2008 19:03 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I suspect that Robbins is the Registered Agent, as one of the properties of being listed as
President in the state's records, and his registered address is probably out-of-date (since I
think he's changed jobs and locations since he was supposed to not be President, if nothing
else).

But, again, I think that it's because corporations normally have day-to-day operations that
their President has to be involved in that forces them to keep this information accurate in
general.