2015 YIR: Karen Sandler Speaks about IRS Charity Issues

by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler on December 11, 2015

[ This is a blog post is the first in our series, Conservancy 2015: Year in Review. ]

Conservancy's 2015 started with the filing of our FY 2013 Form 990. That's the IRS tax(-exempt) form that every charity and trade association in the USA must file annually. Typically, most non-profits ask for the two three-month extensions for filing deadline for the Form 990, and since Conservancy's fiscal year ends in February, our Form 990 is filed by 15 January.

This is the type of essential work that Conservancy does for our member projects. Each member project need not file their own complicated forms to maintain their charitable status and ability to accept earmarked donations for their projects. Instead, Conservancy files one Form 990. We're “looking forward” to spending this holiday season preparing our next FY 2014 Form 990 and completing our mandated annual audit. (Our FY 2013 annual audit is of course already available.)

Fitting with this annual work that Conservancy does, immediately after filing the 990, both Karen and Bradley — thanks to generous travel funding by the conference — quickly boarded flights to LinuxConf Australia in Auckland, New Zealand. At the conference, on the very date of Conservancy's IRS filing deadline, Karen gave talk entitled The Low Down on IRS status for Free and Open Source Software Nonprofits in the US.

Even almost a year later, many of the issues Karen discussed in her talk are not well known in the Free Software community and there are still many confusions in the Open Source and Free Software community about non-profit status and how it works. Enjoy this video now to see more about what Conservancy does for its member projects, and generally to learn more about how both charities and trade associations operate and what they do in our community.

Become a Conservancy Supporter now to help us continue this work in 2016!

The video in this post is also available on Youtube.

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Tags: conservancy, Filings, Year In Review 2015

Jeremy Allison Wants You To Support Conservancy

by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler on December 9, 2015

In this video below, Jeremy Allison, Samba Project co-founder and member of Conservancy's Board of Directors, explains briefly how valuable Conservancy is for the Samba project and explains how you can help support Conservancy!

(Also available on YouTube.)

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Tags: conservancy, supporter

We Matched our 50 Supporter Challenge!

by Karen Sandler on December 4, 2015

Thanks to all of you who signed up and helped us spread the word, we successful earned our $6,000 match! This brings our overall goal to continue our enforcement work down to 2,367. We've added a lot of Supporters in the week and a half since we launched our fundraiser but we have a long way to go. We must substantially increase our individual support to be able to continue defending software freedom for our member projects and the entire free and open source software community. You're showing us that with your help we can do this!

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Tags: conservancy, GPL, supporter

Half Way to Our First Goal and a Message from Stefano Zacchiroli

by Karen Sandler on November 30, 2015

We're happy to celebrate Cyber Monday by getting half way to our first goal of 750 Supporters! We still have 16 Supporters to sign up to meet our match by Friday. Help us get the rest of the way!

Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian project member, former three-term Debian Project Leader and OSI board member recorded this video to encourage you to sign up as a Conservancy Supporter. Stefano talks about why he supports Conservancy and in particular how our activities are ethical, “ensuring that the amount of free software in the world increases year after year.”

Join Stefano and help us get all the way to our fundraising goals by signing up as a Conservancy Supporter today! and helping us to spread the word!

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Tags: conservancy, supporter