Re: Revisited: The Big Swirl Umbrella

On Friday 02 October 2009 14.48:41 Klistvud wrote:
> Besides, are you 
> perfectly positively sure that adding "some margin for the Debian 
> project" is consistent with the legal position of non-profits such as 
> Debian?

Adding a margin to the purchase price is what we (debian.ch) always do when 
selling shirts.  And as to the legal side: selling stuff to raise money is 
no problem.  [1]

Note also that "Debian" does not have a legal status as such.

There's debian.ch, (where I happen to be on the board) and which is covered 
under Swiss law.  There's of course Debian SPI.  A few others, too.  So 
what's the "legal position of Debian"?

But legally, I'd probably sell the Umbrellas -- if I go ahead -- as a 
private person and just donate my profit to debian.ch (converting to USD and 
donating to SPI just loses us money.  It can still be moved around if we 
need it somewhere else later on.)  So the question of non-profit doesn't 
even enter: I, as a person, don't have any non-profit status to maintain.

Obviously we (would probably need DPL approval) might decide to run this 
project and have debian.ch take the risk, but I don't think that'd be a good 
idea, but more for practical reasons than legally.

cheers
-- vbi


[1] not so short digression...
Relevant law in Switzerland starts at 
http://www.admin.ch/ch/d/sr/210/a60.html; basically all formal Associations 
have to be non-profit, but as long as you're not distributing profits to 
members you can do almost anything.  Example: many of the big football teams 
are still "non-profit" associations.  They obviously pay wages and have huge 
budgets, but they're still non-profit in the sense that their aim is not 
profits but running a football team.  Likewise, some (quite big) insurance 
"companies" legally were (non-profit) associations, and had members instead 
of customers.  (I don't know if any are left, I think they all reformed into 
regular corporations.)



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