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At the Thunderbird Summit in 2014, we established goals of raising
income to allow for a stable future for Thunderbird. I've been
distracted since then by issues in Thunderbird 38, but now I intend
to turn my attention mostly to legal and financial issues.<br>
<br>
I've put a lot of thought and research into understanding what is
the best way forward for Thunderbird organizationally. At this
point, I see three main choices.<br>
<br>
1) At one point we had hoped that the Mozilla Foundation would
provide Thunderbird a financial home. That is not completely off the
table yet, but the reality is that they are very reluctant to do
that. This is not a likely path at the moment.<br>
<br>
2) Affiliate with an open source financial sponsorship
organization.<br>
<br>
Software Conservancy is the leading choice here. We have contacted
them, and they are interested. The main advantages of them are:<br>
<br>
- they allow us to function as a US 501c3 (that is, a public-benefit
non-profit), which makes inter-organization issues with Mozilla
easier (such as transferring trademarks should we choose to do
that).<br>
- they have existing legal and accounting infrastructure in place.<br>
<br>
3) Independent registration of a Thunderbird users organization
as a mutual benefit user cooperative.<br>
<br>
This is the direction that I am currently leaning toward, and
requires some explanation, as it is not a typical path.<br>
<br>
By far the biggest asset that we have is our user base, which we
currently estimate to be about 25 million users worldwide. Any plan
to keep Thunderbird viable requires us to turn to those users for
support in one way or another. I do not believe that our
stakeholders would support the traditional path of using advertising
to monetize those users.<br>
<br>
What about donations? What exactly are donors expecting from their
donations? A public benefit non-profit (a 501c3 in the US) is
supposed to accept donations solely on the basis of good will from
sponsors, who should expect no personal return from the donation.
Although perhaps we could claim that Thunderbird's purpose is to
ensure open protocols, or software freedom, I don't believe that is
actually what would motivate our paying users. What users who might
donate want is an email client for their own use that is reliable,
productive, and secure. They expect to benefit directly from that
donation in improvements and sustainability of the product.<br>
<br>
This is not a good match for the 501c3 non-profit model, but it is
exactly what a mutual benefit coop is all about. The US internal
revenue service recognizes this, and has recently started pushing
back at FLOSS models as viable 501c3 candidates. (See
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://blogs.gnome.org/jnelson/2014/06/30/the-new-501c3-and-the-future-of-free-software-in-the-united-states/">https://blogs.gnome.org/jnelson/2014/06/30/the-new-501c3-and-the-future-of-free-software-in-the-united-states/</a>)
<br>
<br>
Also, when we talk about trying to get direct funding from users, we
frequently start asking, what can we offer the users to entice them
to provide funding? As soon as we start doing that, we come up
against rules discouraging that if we are a 501c3. There are similar
issues associated with generating various business income streams
from Thunderbird. If we expect to mostly income as a business, the
IRS thinks we should be a business, and not a 501c3 non-profit.<br>
<br>
The main benefits to being a 501c3 are that it allows US taxpayers
to donate and take a deduction against their income taxes. I do not
believe this is a sufficient benefit to be worth the restrictions
that being a 501c3 will place upon us. (There is still the issue
that it is difficult but not impossible for Mozilla to transfer any
assets such as the Thunderbird trademark to a non-501c3 entity).
Registering as a coop is not a particularly difficult task, and
annual reporting is done as a business and not with the more complex
requirements of a 501c3 non-profit. The entity could still be a
"non-profit" in the sense that all collected funds are used for
improving and supporting the product. (There are other non-501c3
entities that are also possible of course, including non-US
non-profits, but that creates additional difficulties dealing with
Mozilla).<br>
<br>
How would this work? We would register a Thunderbird Users Coop. We
would use in-product promotion to strongly encourage users to join
the coop as members paying annual dues (which would be $10 - $20 per
year). Coop members would have benefits such as:<br>
<ul>
<li>Voting on Coop governance, which would include priorities of
how funds are used, possibly including technical direction for
any hired staff.</li>
<li>Forums specifically for Coop members, which might eventually
have paid staff to deal with support questions.</li>
<li>We would try to negotiate member discounts for email-related
services with third-party providers. <br>
</li>
<li>Of course, we would hope that participating as a financial
partner to keep Thunderbird viable would also be of value to
people regardless of any direct personal benefit.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>We would need to negotiate an agreement with Mozilla for the
user's group to manage aspects of Thunderbird for a specific
period of time, including allowing use of the trademark, and
in-product promotions of the user coop. I would hope we could do
this in partnership with Mozilla, so that we would not have to
forgo use of the Mozilla trademark and infrastructure.<br>
</p>
<p>There are many other issues with this, but I've said enough here
already. Comments are welcome, particularly about any experiences
with coop legal structures. I hope to make substantial progress on
these issues in the next month.<br>
</p>
<p>R Kent James<br>
Chair, Thunderbird Council<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
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