IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole (Wired) [LWN.net]

IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole (Wired)

Posted Jun 27, 2013 21:58 UTC (Thu) by bpearlmutter (subscriber, #14693)
Parent article: IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole (Wired)

There isn't really any need to do all this paperwork yourself. Many open source projects rely on SPI http://www.spi-inc.org/ (or similar organizations) to handle their donations and books. It is very straightforward. SPI keeps the finances for the various associated projects separate, and does as it's told with the money modulo legal constraints. There is no barrier to prevent revoking the association with SPI and transferring the account to a different non-profit. Projects that use SPI's services include Debian, Drupal, Libreoffice, OpenWRT, haskell.org, Arch Linux, Postgresql, and many more. Although I'm not familiar with the workings of other "shell" open source organizations, I imagine they'd operate in a similar fashion.

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IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole (Wired)

Posted Jun 28, 2013 1:51 UTC (Fri) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (4 responses)

While SPI might be awesome and make the life of many projects easier, people shouldn't be forced to go to them because the IRS isn't processing new non-profit corporation applications for open source projects.

IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole (Wired)

Posted Jun 28, 2013 8:59 UTC (Fri) by bpearlmutter (subscriber, #14693) [Link] (3 responses)

As a US citizen living and working abroad, I can assure you that my hatred for the irrational and byzantine US tax code and its intrusive laborious procedures burns with the heat of ten thousand suns. And not little suns like our friendly Sol, but great big ginormous bright stars like Antares.

IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole (Wired)

Posted Jun 28, 2013 17:14 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

> And not little suns like our friendly Sol, but great big ginormous bright stars like Antares.

As a side note, these stars tend to be cooler than Sol. They probably put off more heat energy over their lifetimes since they live orders of magnitude longer than the hotter blue-white stars :) .

IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole (Wired)

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:23 UTC (Fri) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

You're assuming a little main sequence red dwarf. Antares is a supergiant, a star with at least a dozen times the mass of the Sun, now shining with about 57,000 times the Sun's luminosity at the end of its life. Yes, it's cool, but it's also enormous. And over its life, it will end up putting out something more than a dozen times the Sun's lifetime luminosity, because fusion will progress all the way to iron, rather than stopping at carbon/oxygen as in the case of the Sun.

IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole (Wired)

Posted Jun 30, 2013 13:04 UTC (Sun) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]

It is possible for the "heat of ten thousand suns" to be greater for one set of ten thousand "cooler" suns than another set of ten thousand hotter suns.

Heat and temperature are NOT the same thing. The plasma in a compact fluorescent bulb is WAY hotter than a bonfire, but you can hold the former when the latter would cook your hand before you could even touch it. The difference is mass - the amount of plasma in a bulb is probably measured in micrograms, and even if that bonfire is colder than a match there might be a hundred kilos of the wood burning.

(FYI - finding estimates of plasma temperature in a fluorescent bulb is challenging. I found an article "Electron Temperature and Lamp Voltage for Various Ar Concentration in Ne-Hg Discharge Plasma" which indicated that in at least one type of bulb the electron temperature was about 2eV, which corresponds to about 23,000K. I think that most would agree that the typical bonfire is a bit colder than that.)