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<div id="newHeaderAG1" style="font-size: x-small; padding:1em;
background-color:rgba(220,220,240,0.4); border-radius:3px;"> <b>Subject:</b>
Directions for Thunderbird legal and financial home<br>
<b>To:</b> Tb-planning <br>
<b>From: </b>R Kent James<br>
<b>Sent: </b>Tuesday, 07/07/2015 23:33:29 23:33 GMT ST +0100
[Week 27]<br>
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<blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_559C53B9_70507_caspia_com"
cite="mid:559C53B9.70507@caspia.com" type="cite"><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. <b>What users
who might donate want is an email client for their own use that
is reliable, productive, and secure.</b> They expect to benefit
directly from that donation in improvements and sustainability of
the product.</blockquote>
I think that is exactly what the *majority* of users want, but we
should seek an opportunity to run a large scale survey as at this
stage we can as only infer this in the best case in the worst case
it is just a guess.<br>
<br>
Non-profit models are difficult things and there is a lot of red
tape and additional restrictions on monetization / tax law (and
apparently now copyright law, as seen in the article you linked)
etc.<br>
<br>
Also, the law is a dangerous and hermetic place (Quote from the
article):<br>
<blockquote type="cite"><em>"We have not found any authority for the
proposition that the world is a community within the meaning of
<span style="font-size: 125%"><span class="Unicode">§</span></span>
501(c)(3)."</em></blockquote>
I propose that anything that can be construed to reinterpret or
change the open source nature of the Thunderbird Project will be
directly detrimental to the Software and the Community - it is the
main motivator behind most of the contributions of the community
(patches, addons, documentation) - so keeping the open source nature
should remain as a main principle. Since we are not currently
strongly reliant on corporate / tax-deductable funding (which might
have to be compliant with 501c3 but only for American donators;
other countries may have completely different rules on supporting
non-profit organisations) - I would rather base donations (or
payments) on or more pragmatic motivation - the will to keep
Thunderbird for the future and improve it. If we can <i>tie these
two together </i>with a functioning model and <b>manage to
communicate this to the users </b>then we are on the right path
IMO. <br>
<blockquote type="cite">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.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li>An additional motivator may be some extra (non-essential)
features, which could be pre-released to the paying customers
and added for free in the next ESR, maybe participation in a
vetting group (something like tb-planning but on a larger
scale).</li>
</ul>
we should probably have a brainstorming meeting on these to sort the
chaff from the wheat.<br>
<br>
It could also be<b> multi-tiered payment model</b> in order to
include people who cannot (or won't ) pay/afford 20 / year (there
might be a much larger number willing to pay 5euros/year); I quite
like something closer to "Patreon" models where users can pick their
own amounts according to what they can manage.The big advantage here
is that people will pay more if they find that the product has
improved or the Tb management asks for support for a specific effort
(insert your favorite papercut here).<br>
<br>
In summary I believe it is good to do the ground work (I really like
the "mutual benefit coop" thought, we have entire banks {building
societies} and farming industries here in Ireland that are based on
this model, and it appears to a very financially stable concept) .
We probably will need<br>
<br>
1 - soon: some market research on what would motivate Thunderbird
users to financially support or even just "stick with" Thunderbird
(I think brand identity is an important factor, so I would like to
see some figures on whether users would accept leaving the "mozilla"
group if it was necessary, and how important the name/logo are for
people to keep using it). (*)<br>
<br>
2 - eventually: to hire a lawyer to work out which of our
requirements can be translated into a legally binding business
model. Of course after clarifying the requirements with the
Thunderbird Council<br>
<br>
One more question as regards the rules governing it, is Thunderbird
currently based on Californian Law?<br>
<br>
(*) One more anecdotal thing is my own pattern of using software I
trust: I still use Winamp (the window mp3 player) which hasn't been
developed for a decade and has changed management numerous times -
it still has a strong user base; while it was developed it had short
innovation cycles and lots of versions. I think would drop this
product the minute they would try to rename it as I would suspect a
rebuild from the ground up.<br>
<br>
<br>
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