[Xfce-foundation] Xfce Foundation has been granted non-profit status

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hi folks,

it took a while for various reasons and I've been waiting eagerly for
the tax office to reply to our request of approval. They finally did
and so today, I'm happy to announce that the Xfce Foundation has been
approved as a non-profit organization in Germany starting April 19th,
2012!

This was one of the main steps towards a fully operational
organization. The next step will be to get it registered as a German
e.V. which among other things means that the organization can act as a
juristic entity (aka legal/juristic person). It also means that the
non-profit status will become permanent (at the moment it is only valid
until April 19th, 2013).

I will arrange for the registration to be prepared by our notary in
Germany within the next weeks. All board members will have to sign the
request for registration, which may take a while as Nick, Jérôme and I
all will have to go to a local notary to authenticate themselves and
have their signature certified. As far as I know, each local notary
will in addition have to contact the corresponding German embassy to
get another document needed for this signature certification to be valid
internationally. It's weird but I'm hoping that our notary will tell us
exactly what to do.

Once we've done that and the e.V. status has been granted, we can
actually start doing useful things around Xfce!

Note that with the non-profit status having been granted, we are
already allowed to accept donations. However, I am not sure whether or
not we'll need the e.V. status to actually open bank and PayPal
accounts. We'll investigate ASAP.

  - Jannis