Software in the Public Interest is a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. Our mission is to help genuine, substantial, and significant free and open source software projects by handling their non-technical administrative tasks so that they aren't required to operate their own legal entity.
SPI acts as a fiscal sponsor to many free and open source projects. Services offered to projects can be found here. FOSS projects interested in becoming associated to SPI should read the Associated Project HOWTO. The relationship between SPI and associated projects is explained here.
Additionally, we encourage programmers to use the GNU General Public License or other licenses that allow free redistribution and use of software and hardware developers to distribute documentation that will allow device drivers to be written for their product.
Incorporation
Software in the Public Interest was incorporated as a non-profit organization on June 16, 1997 in the state of New York.
In 1999, the Internal Revenue Service of the United States government determined that under section 501 (a) of the Internal Revenue Code SPI qualifies for 501 (c) (3) (non-profit organization) status under section 509 (a) (1) and 170 (b) (1) (A) (vi). This means that all donations made to SPI and its supported projects are tax deductible for donors in the United States.
How is SPI run?
The documents that define the purpose and operation of SPI are the By-Laws and the Certificate of Incorporation. It has a Board of Directors which includes four officers in the roles of President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer.
How can I contribute?
As an individual you can consider becoming a member. See the donations page for details on how to contribute to an existing associated project.
Website
This website is managed using ikiwiki+git. You can view the revision history via gitweb and send any updates, either as a git pull request or a patch, to webmaster@spi-inc.org.