[Noisebridge-discuss] Noisebridge Lending Library?
Sai Emrys
noisebridge at saizai.com
Sun Feb 7 09:16:34 UTC 2010
On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Will Sargent <will.sargent at gmail.com> wrote:
>> People who donate things to noisebridge do so with
>> some sense of mission, and donors are part of the
>> noisebridge community whether or not they are members.
>> it is not excellent to disregard the intentions of
>> donors: at least we should understand the intent of the
>> donation before co-opting stuff for personal purposes.
>
> Not quite sure I understand this; is there a license attached to donations?
No. However, there is a sort of flag attached to any resource that
goes into a nonprofit. Once something is donated to a nonprofit, it
may not unduly profit any non-profit.
In this context, what that means is that books donated to NB cannot be
just given to individuals, because then the individuals (who are not
nonprofits) would be profiting from it. They can be *sold* at fair
market value, though.
There is an arguable exception, which is that charities are allowed to
just give stuff to the group of people that they service. But there're
complications there - demonstrating need, showing that you're not just
using it to funnel money to your friends, well-defining the target
group, etc. Probably not an area NB wants to touch, more because it's
a PITA than because it's not possible.
tl;dr: It's a tax thing.
On-topic: FWIW, I've borrowed some of the books on the shelf for a
week or two at a time, but always returned them. I think that this is
reasonable use, since one can't really read them while in the space
(it's distracting and there isn't enough time). I also think it would
be not-nice to just take it, and that accidentally taking it and
forgetting to return it is a risk. I don't know how to
mitigate/balance these though.
- Sai
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