Summary of the LoCoTeam meeting, 2005-09-21

[freedoomer at mandragor.org]

> Naturally the laws vary fom country to country, but I think it is pretty
> common that charities are much more highly regulated than non-profits.
> I admit to not knowing French law, but I suspect it is equally onerous
> in terms of requirements placed on the organisation's activities, audits
> of the those activities, required legal filings, restrictions placed on
> the individual trustees of a charity, etc.

In France there is something called "Association a but non lucratif, loi
1901"; litteraly translated it gives "not for profit organisation".
Charity organisations would be in France "Association d'interet public", I
don't think we could get this status.

"Associations 1901" or not-for-profit organisations are something really
common on France. We want to create this because:
  - Our servers now belong to noone.
  - The donations are actually on our personnal paypal account; if we
can't give them to an association we should pay taxes on it.
  - There is something called "CNIL" in France, an organisation to which
every website working with people's personal data have to declare
itself. The declaration is not the same if I declare the website being
mine, or being the organisation's.
  - There is a commercial entity who wants to give us money, but they need
us to be a not for profit organisation to do this.
  - We are working with a cybercentre in the north of France who is
willing to help us distribute the cds, and to convince the city to give
us a small budget (which is, according to our contact there, possible),
we need an official entity, not only someone tellin "hi, i'm yann, i
need money" ;) btw I asked if we could get some thousands of cds short
after release time, is it possible?

You are suggesting we use the ubuntu foundation for these activities.
Actually we would prefer to have our own organisation because:
  - We need money for some of our activites (hosting, in a near future cds
shipping, conferences..) - and as far as I know, the Ubuntu foundation
does not finance the locoteams, so we need our own budget, and
organisation to handle it.
  - The Ubuntu Foundation does not exist yet;
  - if possible we want to be able to do as much as possible without
needing the ubuntu foundation, as you have enough work without having to
deal with our problems. I think we would have a far better reactivity
that way. Communication with Canonical is far, far too complicated...
It's written on Ubuntu.com that we should ask trademarks@ for use the
name on banners; we had a conference 2 weeks ago, asked a month ago for
the authorisation, and never got it :/
  - It we had our own budget... it is well known that Canonical/the
UbuntuFoundation has a some millions $, and it's quite complicated to
explain to someone that giving 1000$ to the Foundation, which already
has 10M$, would help us significantly.
  - Not for profit organisation are well known in France, and people are
confident in that type of organisation.  I think people would trust more
a 1901 organisation than the Ubuntu Foundation.


For all these reasons, I ask you if it would be possible for the french
team to have a trademark agreement that would allow it to create an
organisation named Ubuntu-fr (which is in France really cheap and easy to
do) and to use it for the points I described above.


Yann - Ubuntufr