Just want to say that I appreciate Nim and the direction Araq has taken the project.
I agree that Nim does not need a Foundation. I prefer a language with a based visionary founder rather than a brigade of power hungry political activists that destroy everything they touch. There appears to be a group of vocal complainers on Reddit that are spreading FUD to newcomers and not doing the language justice.
Recommend folks stay off Reddit and post questions directly here.
I don't think I've ever read or seen political activism from software foundations, so I'm not sure why you make that claim (to each his own opinion I guess)
The goal of having a legal organisation is usually to be able to sign contracts and manage money without engaging the liability of specific individuals. It's there to provide legal protection. It can also help for succession plan on the long run.
So you weren't following the "wokot" drama, I envy you. The keyword here is "community manager". Who wanted to be one, ages ago?
I agree there's shouldn't be a Foundation, all donation should be used as compensation for the core developers. No silly titles.
So you weren't following the "wokot" drama
Do you mean the thing with godot where they mocked some guy on twitter who claimed using a game engine was "woke" ?
Even if you can find one or two example of badly managed org, that's not the case for the majority of software orgs (Apache, Julia fundation, Zig software foundation, GNU, VideoLAN to name a few I've interacted directly with).
all donation should be used as compensation for the core developers.
Sure, for a small team this can works. But you won't scale with a "donation as salary" model. If you're fine with Nim staying small, then yes a foundation doesn't makes sense.
Oh also legal entities can hire people, so it's not that different except with contracts that can protect both sides. Most donation to non-profit can usually be (partially at least) tax exempted (although this is country-dependent) so it's easier to attract donation from companies.
I don't really have a horse on that race tbh, I just find curious (and not very convincing tbh) to be against "legal entities" as a concept.
I'm totally the wrong person to setup a foundation
You don't necessarily have to handle the boring bureaucratic work all by yourself. Perks of a community is also that you're not alone.
I'm not sure it's necessary either. My current team is small and effective.
That is entirely up to you of course. I'd tend to agree that for a small team there's might not be immediate benefit (and longer term consideration can wait until after Nim v3 / Nimony :) )
Let's not confound a legal entity with any kind of agenda.
Nim would probably benefit long run from having some kind of organisation. Mostly as a way to gather funds and larger donations, as well as being able to structure the non-programming work that goes into building any kind of successful project.
As a moderator I also feel obliged to mention that regardless of legal entity status of the Nim project the community will not tolerate ad hominem attacks. And as long as you can be respectful of other community members you are welcome.
When one does foundations (be it for profit, non profit) there is most definitely a link towards agendas, mainly because this institutions need investments and that's actually driving a lot of this.
Even if they don't have a foundation behind them, but a big publicly traded company, it too is listed, because of the associated company and their dependency on investments. And this type of belief is a huge metric with some investment firms.
Rather we like it or not, there isn't much of a separation as their once was. Some of it is actually codified legally within some states here if putting the foundation stateside.
Even the ones that were listed above, not all of them are free of verbiage that at best would suggest atleast tacit support of political causes.
While there are pluses to having a foundation, there are definite minus as well (but it also depends on who is in control of said foundation). And yes, the bigger the institution/foundation, there more non tangential aspects will affect it.
Not all, by any means, but there are more compared to what people realize (but if one looks in investment areas, usually can find it).
over 10 grand per month lost in donations or 160K per year.
Do you have all four extra months after December, or somewhere during the year?
The OP claims that Foundation is a bad idea outright. In reality, it is a matter of resource allocation - you gain more $$$ but you are beholden to more people.
How Godot handled bullies and censored community is not a reflection on usefulness of a foundation.