Hi,
the flashrom project gets donation offers roughly twice a month, and quite a few times people wanted to donate more than 50 EUR / 60 USD. We can't accept those donations right now because there is no legal entity behind the flashrom project. At the same time, we could use some money to improve flasher support by buying some flash chips and programmers so all developers can easily test changes. Besides that, posters/handouts for LinuxTag/FOSDEM/... booths are currently paid for by those flashrom guys who go to those exhibitions.
My proposal is to create a nonprofit club in Germany (eingetragener Verein) in the same way as KDE and OpenEmbedded did it. Given that the majority of the flashrom team lives somewhere in the EU, starting or joining a nonprofit in the USA wouldn't make sense. An informal request for comments among those who are involved in flashrom did yield some noticeable interest, and I guess now is the time to make this plan public.
coreboot is not an immediate target of this nonprofit club because I don't want to interfere with any plans which may be ongoing on the coreboot side. Nonwithstanding the above, if the coreboot project leaders decide that participating in a nonprofit in Germany would make sense, there's no reason not to do this together. Then again, the majority of coreboot developers live in the USA and a nonprofit outside the USA might not make sense for them.
Side note: We (coreboot/flashrom) won a substantial amount of money (to be redeemed in hardware) in a "project beauty contest" held by Thomas-Krenn.com, a nice server manufacturer. We need a legal entity to accept that hardware.
Comments?
Regards, Carl-Daniel