[Adium-devl] Fwd: Adium, SoC taxes, and seed keys

[Evan Schoenberg]

I sent this to David, but I think it's of general interest.  
Forwarding my reply.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Evan Schoenberg <evan.s at dreskin.net>
> Date: August 18, 2006 8:08:23 AM EDT
> To: David Smith <catfish.man at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Adium, SoC taxes, and seed keys
>
>
> On Aug 17, 2006, at 3:42 PM, David Smith wrote:
>
>> 	I have a vague memory that a while ago we considered making Adium  
>> a legal entity... it seems to me that perhaps it's time to revisit  
>> this idea. One of the reasons is for handling things like the tax  
>> thread going on on the summer-admins list right now; the other is  
>> the possibility of getting a select account or two and  
>> distributing the seed keys around ($500 starts looking a lot more  
>> doable when it has a 20% hardware discount attached, and is  
>> distributed between 5 people). Supposedly you're only allowed to  
>> distribute the 5 keys/account within your "organization". I'm not  
>> entirely sure how Apple defines an organization, but I doubt our  
>> loose confederation of random people would really meet the criteria.
>
> Sean Egan has founded a non-profit, the Instant Messaging Freedom  
> Corporation.  I'm (going to be, once the lawyers get through doing  
> their thing) on its board of directors.  He's basically said that  
> we can be as loosely or as closely associated with it as we want.   
> As a starting point, I'm going to be having Google send the SoC  
> money (with no withholding, since it's a nonprofit) there, from  
> which Sean will cut me the check and I'll distribute out to our  
> mentors.  The tax result is that mentors will have $500 income, and  
> that's the only tax burden involved.
>
> I'll look into how Apple defines an organization, as I don't know  
> anything about it yet either.
>
>> 	Of course, the downside is that I have no idea how much work and/ 
>> or money is required to do this. It might be less practical than  
>> it seems.
> I did a bunch of research on it, and had some off-list discussions  
> with some of the people who said on the SoC Administrators list  
> that they had experience in this department.  The take-home message  
> was that unless you plan to have a full-time or near-full-time  
> individual managing the corporation, forming a real legal entity is  
> way more trouble than its worth... apparently there's a ton of red  
> tape, quarterly government forms, and so on involved... nobody said  
> anything that didn't come down to, "avoid dealing with it if you  
> have any possible way of doing so."
>
> -Evan
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/attachments/20060818/de4241a6/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/attachments/20060818/de4241a6/attachment.sig>