Transparency of non-profits [LWN.net]

Transparency of non-profits

Posted Feb 22, 2017 22:50 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
Parent article: Principled free-software license enforcement

This is something I've gotten "religion" on recently, so I thought this interesting:

"Transparent: we need disclosure of non-profit organizations' donor relationships"

It comes up in this discussion with respect to law suits, and the importance of transparency to ensure the financial motivation is clear. Transparency also came up in the article on "Consider the maintainer" ( https://lwn.net/Articles/712215/ ) with respect to avoiding community tensions in funding developers.

Basically, I just want to point out that the importance of transparency comes up regularly in a number of contexts, and bump its visibility.

There are some non-profits in free software / open-source that do a great job on this. However, this is unfortunately not universally the case.

to post comments

Transparency of non-profits

Posted Feb 26, 2017 1:12 UTC (Sun) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link] (1 responses)

paulj wrote:

I just want to point out that the importance of transparency comes up regularly in a number of contexts, and bump its visibility. There are some non-profits in free software / open-source that do a great job on this. However, this is unfortunately not universally the case.

I hope you consider Conservancy to already be one of those doing a great job on this, as we publish a tremendous amount about any litigation we get involved with (see our materials about Hellwig's VMware case we're providing funding for) and we put almost-excessive efforts to make our public financial filings understandable. (Fontana's talk, BTW, failed to mention any of this detailed transparency available, and I continue to await his comments on what transparency is missing.)

Anyway, I hope any place where people think Conservancy's enforcement work is inadequately transparent, they'll raise the issue on the principles-discuss mailing list. I'm obviously following this particular comment thread, but I can't assure that I'll notice and be able to respond on every LWN thread about GPL enforcement.

Transparency of non-profits

Posted Feb 27, 2017 7:49 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Hi Bradley,

SF Conservancy was one I had in mind with regard to "do a great job on [transparency]"! ;)