[LLVMdev] Offer of membership to LLVM into the Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc.

[Chris Lattner]

On Sep 18, 2012, at 5:46 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn at sfconservancy.org> wrote:
> I'm sorry for the intrusion of a project policy discussion onto the
> developer list, but there may be many here who may have thoughts, input,
> or question regarding Conservancy's offer for LLVM's membership,
> discussed below.  If you're not interested in that topic, please feel
> free to ignore this message.

Just to provide some context for what is going on here: Tanya and I (and others) would like to get LLVM incorporated into a proper non-profit organization.  The aim of this is to help solve specific problems around the developer meeting (e.g. student travel reimbursements), make it easier for the project to accept donations to sponsor infrastructure like hosting costs, provide more structure around the lab.llvm.org testing infrastructure, and perhaps even get llvm.org and the mailing lists hosted somewhere with more guarantees on uptime and service.  I really like LLVM being on "neutral ground" given the wide range of organizations that contribute to and use it, and it has outgrown the University of Illinois.

With these as the goal, there are a number of options.  We could incorporate our own non-profit for the project, but that has a relatively high administrative overhead, and we'd all rather be writing code.  :)  Another option is to join an existing non-profit organization, and the SFC is one specific organization that we've been talking with (and a leading contender).  SFC is the parent organization of other prominent open source projects like Boost and Git.

Joining the SFC would give us the benefits of a non-profit organization without the administrative overhead.  Oh and Bradley and is group already know what they're doing, so we wouldn't have to learn it from the bottom up. :-)

That said, we are still talking to several other organizations.  This *is* a great thread to discuss pros and cons of LLVM joining the SFC specifically though!

-Chris