[flashrom] Creating a nonprofit

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

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