Thank you to Eclipse for stepping up and organizing the important work outlined for the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group.
I'm writing as a senior member of the CiviCRM open source community to support Timo's points.
CiviCRM is used by over 10,000 non-profits around the world, including a number of notable open source organizations like the Open Source Initiative and the Python Software Foundation.
I provided a comment on the draft language asking for changes to "Steward Members are organisations that are recognised not-for-profits in their country of registration and host open source software projects made available under an OSI-approved licence(s)." CiviCRM uses the OSI approved copyleft AGPLv3 license, but it is not a recognised not-for-profit in its country of registration. When our 19 year old community was creating a legal entity, the US government was in a several year period where the IRS was refusing to grant open source communities 501(c)3 status. So following legal advice our core team founders, after getting feedback from some community members, decided to incorporate as a for profit entity in California.
Working with non-profits constrains the professional fees but not the security needs of the CiviCRM service provider community. There are many CiviCRM installations including for political parties and donor portals that have over a million contacts. So echoing Timo, I'd like Open Source Steward to be added, and for there to be transparency around the budget and the justification for the fee structure.
Joe Murray, PhD (he/him)
Elected Member, CiviCRM Community Council
We respectfully acknowledge the autonomy of Indigenous peoples, and that JMA Consulting is located on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples which is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit.
