8:08 a.m.
Hello,
Am Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 11:58:32PM +0200 schrieb Ricardo Wurmus:
If we merely want a legal entity for shared ownership of assets —
would
something simpler (like Guix Europe) suffice?
as a follow-up to the discussion, setting up a non-profit organisation
in France (and I suppose it will be similar in other European countries)
is very easy: You just need two participants, and bylaws that you can
more or less copy-paste from existing organisations (of course, we invested
a bit more time in writing those of Guix Europe, but there is no difficulty
in principle). Then you declare your organisation to the authorities,
and that is all. Such an organisation can own assets and even employ people
(but that is always tricky since then one needs to know about labour laws,
social insurance, taxes and so on). The important thing is to not make
profits, or at least to not cash them out to the members.
What is difficult is getting a special fiscal status, allowing individuals
to deduce their donations from income tax (details vary by country: in
Germany donations are deduced from the income, so the savings depend on the
personal marginal tax rate; in France about 60% of the donations are
reimbursed by the tax office). For that, one needs a certain importance
(I seem to remember a yearly turn-around of 100000€, for instance, and maybe
a certain number of members), and a special procedure to be recognised as of
public utility. For a small organisation such as Guix Europe, this is not a
realistic option.
So I assume this is meant by the term "fiscal sponsor", and it makes sense
to outsource it to specialised organisations such as Software Freedom
Conservancy. It may even make sense to have several organisations in
separate jurisdictions: For instance as a French tax-payer, I can only
deduce donations to a European non-profit. Maybe the FSFE would be a
suitable partner, if they directly support projects?
Andreas