On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 3:01:18 PM UTC-6, Andrew Bingham wrote:
Another alternative might be to actually set up an educational 501c3 and do it as an organized charity.
That's a good idea. Or operate under an existing organization. Many people don't know that Debian (the universal free OS) operates financially and legally as a project under SPI which is a 501c3, as the biggest project out of 36 projects. Adding a 37th project would not be unreasonable.
On the positive side, right outta the SPI bylaws we fit at least 3 categories, maybe more. On the negative side to fit the general free software vibe of SPI we'd probably have to "encourage" some vaguely DFSG / FOSS like licensing. I don't think "encourage" implies mandatory GPL for everything, but probably implies something more formalized than the existing state of none of us have sued each other yet for copyright violation, which I guess technically could happen since some of this isn't entirely formal.
SPI is not the only "grassroots free/open hardware/software financial services holding company" out there, but it is the one I know the most about.