Yorba Foundation

Yorba Foundation was a non-profit software group based in San Francisco,[2] and founded by Adam Dingle wanting to bring first class software to the open source community. This organization has been created to answer people thinking open source brings hard to use, clunky and low-quality software usable only by hackers.

Yorba Foundation
Founded2009-02-17[1]
FounderAdam Dingle
Dissolved2015-10-25
TypeCommunity
FocusOffice software
Location
ProductsShotwell, Geary
Staff
5
Websitewww.yorba.org
twitter.com/yorba_org (Twitter)

The company was made of 5 employees: Jim Nelson (coder and executive director), Adam Dingle (founder), Charles Lindsay, Eric Gregory and Nate Lillich (software engineers).[3][4][5]

History

In December 2009, Yorba Foundation applied to get the 501(c)(3) status. After some requests for clarification by IRS in 2010 and 2011, Yorba received on May 22, 2014 a denial for that tax exemption status. The reason for the rejection, explained by IRS, is that the organization makes software that can be used by any person for any purpose, and not for a specific community. Therefore, Yorba cannot be considered as a charity while the Apache Foundation, with exactly the same purpose, is considered as-it.[6] Although this status would have helped, according to Jim Nelson, this deny does not hinge on Yorba existence.[7]

On October 31, 2013, Yorba moved from San Francisco's Mission District to the Financial District down the hill from Chinatown, still in San Francisco.[8][9][10][11]

In April 2015, at the end of the month, the last Yorba employee, Jim Nelson, left the foundation.[12] The reason for the end of activity is lack of being financially sustainable: funding ran out, donations did not match expenses and even if Yorba had received the 501(c)(3) status allowing to be tax exempted, they would still have probably to shut the project down.[13]

On October 25, 2015, the following message was posted on their webpage without any further explanations:

Yorba was a non-profit free software group based in San Francisco that was active from 2009 until early 2015

May 2016 marked the completion of the process to begin the formal dissolution of the organization.[14] The complete dissolution should happen later in 2016.[15]

In May 2016, Yorba assigned the copyright of all these pieces of software to Software Freedom Conservancy except California which will be assigned in the near future due to an oversight on Yorba's part.[14][16]

Main developments
  • Shotwell, an image organizer for the Linux operating system
  • Geary, a free email client written in Vala
  • Valencia, a plugin for gedit to help with coding in the Vala programming language
  • gexiv2 GObject wrapper around Exiv2[17]
  • California, a GNOME 3 calendar application[18]

References
  1. "IRS response to 501(C)(3) Yorba Foundation application" (PDF). Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  2. "Donate to Yorba". Archived from the original on September 20, 2015. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  3. "YORBA AT GUADEC, A CORUÑA". Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  4. "Geary: a beautiful modern open-source email client". Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  5. "AUTHORS". Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  6. "Are open source foundations nonprofits? The IRS says no". Retrieved June 28, 2015.
  7. "THE NEW 501(C)(3) AND THE FUTURE OF FREE SOFTWARE IN THE UNITED STATES". Retrieved June 28, 2015.
  8. "OCTOBER MISCELLANY". Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  9. https://web.archive.org/web/20130325073754/http://www.yorba.org:80/about/contact-us/
  10. https://web.archive.org/web/20140217193700/http://www.yorba.org:80/about/contact-us/
  11. https://web.archive.org/web/20150920025533/http://yorba.org/about/donate/
  12. After a direct contact with Adam Dingle
  13. "Re: Yorba status". November 16, 2015. Retrieved November 17, 2015.
  14. "Yorba Assigns Shotwell and Geary Copyrights to Software Freedom Conservancy". May 10, 2016. Retrieved June 25, 2016.
  15. "Re: Yorba status – Geary article". June 26, 2016. Retrieved July 5, 2016.
  16. "Re: Yorba status – Geary article". June 26, 2016. Retrieved July 5, 2016.
  17. "Yorba Foundation – Developers of great Linux desktop software". Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  18. "ANNOUNCING CALIFORNIA 0.2". Retrieved June 28, 2015.
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