The Document Foundation Launches €50K Challenge, Legal Entity Quest

An anonymous reader writes "The Document Foundation, the group responsible for forking the OpenOffice.org project away from Oracle's control and into the shiny new LibreOffice suite, has announced a drive to raise €50,000 to set up as a legal entity. The Foundation, formed by numerous OpenOffice.org community members tired of the overbearing hand of Oracle preventing them from progressing the development of the popular open source productivity suite, has passed several recent milestones. It's released a full feature-complete version of its LibreOffice productivity suite, and announced deals with companies including Canonical to have LibreOffice replace OpenOffice.org as the default productivity suite in several Linux distributions."

ad bait?

[mr_mischief]

All the links in the summary point to the same site. All the links in all the stories linked from here go back to the same web of stories on the same site. There's not a link to an actual original reference anywhere except to the original mailing list announcement about Libre Office. There's not even one to The Document Foundation's site. It's all just ad-bearing pages forming a neat little maze.

Fifty thousand! What the hell?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Fifty thousand sounds like an outrageous figure. I can start (and have started) a company for MUCH MUCH less than that. "The Steering Committee came to the conclusion that a foundation based in Germany would provide the best stability" *cough* BS *cough*. And their second choice is the UK? What the hell? Are these people naive or just lazy? For a borderless organization, it simply strains belief that they would choose a business-hostile jurisdiction to incorporate under. Hell, I could make some phone calls and have a Hong Kong company up and running by the end of next week. Even if they wanted to stay in Europe for some reason, aren't there friendly jurisdictions like Luxembourg or Andorra or something? The equivalent to Delaware? I smell a rat, someone (or someone's cousin, fraternity brother, etc.) is making some cash off this deal.

Re:Fifty thousand! What the hell?

[vadim_t]

Best practice for what, though? That sounds like a rule of thumb for opening a business. If you're going to rent office/shop space, purchase equipment, hire employees and so on and don't expect to be making a profit for a year, then that makes sense.

But this is community based software development we're talking about. Everybody already has their equipment, no office space is needed, and nobody should need to be hired (except if they need a web designer or lawyer temporarily I guess).

So what's all that money for?