Clearly, Open Source Advocates Should Dress in Sports Jerseys

The social and technological impact of the Open Source movement for innovation has been staggering. Interestingly, though, several prominent projects are losing their non-profit status.

Ruth McCambridge of The NonProfit Quarterly notes that history is repeating itself, and that many journalistic endeavors had been struggling to maintain their non-profit status.

Many were repeatedly denied, although there were already a number of us existing as nonprofits, on the basis that their revenue plans were too much like commercial journalism organizations. Evidently, this happens when the number of groups of a particular type increases to the point that it catches someone’s attention at the IRS. Eventually the logjam let go ... but it was a frustrating period that cost a number of organizations grants and even their futures

Digital Media Law has an excellent reference summary for ensuring that the journalistic inclined are efficiently packaged for IRS consideration. These materials should be easily applicable to many Open Source initiatives.

Or, on the other hand, the Open Source community could take the example of the NFL, a 9.5 billion dollar a year enterprise which is a legally recognized non-profit. The benefits for playoffs from Drupal against Wordpress, or Linux versus BSD would be certainly raise the entertainment value of the Open Source community.

Go team.