5 ms·

> then maybe don't call yourself a "charity" The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charitable organization registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wa

by ethbr0 5y ago

> then maybe don't call yourself a "charity" The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charitable organization registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. [0] We can quibble over whether we think they're doing work in the best way, but by authoritative definitions they are a charity. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation#Foundation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation#Foun...

paulmd 5y ago
This is the part where HNers learn that simply being registered as a charity doesn't mean jack shit. Hospital systems that make billions of dollars a year of profit are charities! Companies that own billions of dollars of real estate holdings for no purpose except speculation are charities! Non-profit simply means that profits aren't paid out to shareholders. It doesn't mean you can't make enormous profits and accrue vast amounts of wealth.
- samhw 5y ago
  Notoriously in England, public schools are charities. My school made god knows how much by offering a few bursaries and thereby counting itself as a charity. My best friend's school, old Slough Comp, is possibly one of the greatest forces of anti-charity and anti-egalitarianism in the country and yet is still - IIRC - a charity. It means absolutely zero whatsoever. Perhaps other countries are different.
  - stuaxo 5y ago
    For people in the US "Public School" in the UK are actually private.
    - akiselev 5y ago
      And "Slough Comp" is a tongue in cheek name for Eton College
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >"Public School" in the UK are actually private That's confusing as hell. Can anyone please explain?
      - samhw 5y ago
        Yeah, sure. When they started[0], the aristocracy were educated by private tutors, and these schools actually were for the poor (ok, fine: for 'poor', read 'slightly less than royalty'). That context has obviously changed a lot since, and it now feels a bit silly. Also, while that person's comment is correct, it's worth noting that not all private schools are referred to as public schools. That name is only for the oldest, mostly-boarding schools that were big players when the system was (finally) formalised in the 19th century. The vast majority of private schools would just be called private schools. And then state schools are the genuinely-free ones. [0] ETA: Mostly around the Tudor period I believe; i.e. by Shakespeare's time most if not all of them were well established.
        unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        Yes -- but also all "Public" schools were not "Church" schools. Basically there is a time when education was almost exclusively monastic; those who were not taught privately were taught by religious institutions. The public schools were free of that influence to a greater extent. There is one more tier of school you don't mention which sits somewhere below "public": the "commercial school". There were some of these owned by the livery companies, and were a tier of schools that were created along the lines of the public schools but before the school system was fully established. Most of them were not fee-paying but were funded by donations or livery company charitable funds. They taught largely vocational skills (but professional ones rather than technical ones); parents sent their kids to commercial schools to bring back the knowledge to professionalise the family business or to set them up in a trade. (I went to a school that was originally founded this way, but was a part-state-owned grammar school by the time I got there a century later)
        samhw 5y ago
        Oh wow, thanks for adding that detail. I didn’t know about practically any of that. That’s a fascinating side of things: I thought there must have been a slight lacuna in my understanding, that not all the educated classes could have employed private tutors, and that definitely fills in a missing link for me. Though it adds another small question: aren’t/weren’t most public schools severely Anglican? I know my school was quite radical at the time for admitting Jewish boys, so that always painted a picture of a not-exactly-super-secular institution, but maybe I’ve got the wrong impression in some way... Also, those commercial schools sound a bit - subtracting for a moment the fee-paying aspect - like the German technical education system which I’ve always liked the sound of. I wish we had something more like that today, though obviously now it wouldn’t - or shouldn’t - be fee-paying.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    It doesn't mean 'absolutely zero' - the key point is that it must have charitable aims and objectives which it strives to achieve or encourage. For example, a university student union can sell you beer in the SU bar and run events to raise cash in order to further its aims in education and student experience etc.
  - outsb 5y ago
    > It means absolutely zero whatsoever I know you're being dramatic, but at least charities in the UK do have vastly different treatment by HMRC, and much more granular financial reporting requirements. Raspberry Pi foundation annual accounts are here: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-live.ch.gov.uk/docs/CBTw8ypbBIKtolVf1svcpbxuWhrOajn3wU5DG5X_FaA/application-pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAWRGBDBV3CSIPE72Y%2F20220413%2Feu-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20220413T005610Z&X-Amz-Expires=60&X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEKj%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEaCWV1LXdlc3QtMiJHMEUCIQCLavstNj2AZ7Mh8DIGM5iepBday7nPVz9s%2BYXCcmLNcQIgXtJ8NY32aAj62xpMm6N%2F94aLSs7na2EfHvU0OSTplWAq%2BgMIURAEGgw0NDkyMjkwMzI4MjIiDBkjl1QA%2FFNPGilPlCrXAzW%2FZbJeiKkGOQSFNOUEwKjFupuidn1SafxEySUmgXFePK0LeQIVhE9b4IC3d%2FVBBB3fS7FMwpslBp4dw6sOx4bclbKv2NRNv40fXy9ajBC4DCDPSqaGObNNpsyl7IsdFqyV1Q8oP1x2BAtHE2CqQT1aL2ss%2BMyUIV8CFDP8q8Wx%2Bdi%2BoBkI1xkv9aVEArCVIJPvNXBSfySwNZWzgCQrR7Lt2VX4bf63cr19BlcyjaGcgAMw5bPWelsM3gzJELwSonrX8XmorXStIgTyh0HarctRLvgi6ENaXUw3BPTbQei%2FwfpPaeXK54dtEPsFcDkQHNwLu9XgNME6FnoWOohFRtIrDYvoVQVgaNC2svRAxjg%2FzNnOKHL80JJMA%2BvlypIqnOMBqfVrWkgL84JLDC%2BdRPzrKIjz5ThfHcf6gt0P%2FkMFOw1h4wamwxl5TtWjB7lhc%2FaVSxIobnK%2ByfHEsep4G%2B3YdZzX5Jv32O3BwKb9NTr8ywZ9O9tasIs%2B865ZUv%2BOWNH9NlR1DLgGWds26JPeUgy4%2Fom5ASIpirlpa8eCtpW9BhPs5Qn842WV4J%2FDo2JUUTsWDxJl1BRm0nsf40eWtbkgDPXu8EUCGYcpklAWaeIvollZzZCRTjD9nNiSBjqlAW81oklMnc3Qc3Sk5wwIub%2FLAC1uO8mXqd2JYsQ05Y0XzLRPQX2qwDW%2F3VFdGSCdK1%2FNy%2BroVqYHRgdD8qNWK3V2wM1GzP8oLwFCPGQyq%2FjYvlR0NClczaruZzIVDg1om9hOEv20eX7nwc2%2BpZ3D6L2%2F7XaQGmpaxAE92aXANTQCKNwQF7WwTe57H8u962r2gnz8GoKjJdI2aj%2FI3fr2FMdaWUTdKA%3D%3D&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&response-content-disposition=inline%3Bfilename%3D%22companies_house_document.pdf%22&X-Amz-Signature=375c8edf4936fca6cf9e6cc7de01e1d027877c02b585c9a20826edf3c7ce1135 https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-live.... For example we can see one member of staff was taking home more than £290k in 2020 It seems this is a rather profitable business hiding beneath the label of "education exemption"
- mattbee 5y ago
  A UK registered charity has to have a "public benefit requirement" and has some fierce governance and reporting requirements, it's more than just a non-profit company. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/public-benefit-rules-for-charities https://www.gov.uk/guidance/public-benefit-rules-for-chariti...
  - paulmd 5y ago
    It's the same in the US, but in both cases, "public benefit" is nebulous and unenforceable. If you just say "we're advancing public health!" that's a charitable purpose, even if the majority of what you're doing is profit-seeking and completely unrelated to that. Much like how CEOs get wide discretion as to what "advancing shareholder interests" means - maybe it's in the long-term interest of public health to build a huge amount of real-estate holdings that you could (hypothetically) use to generate revenue and advance public health (uh huh) some time in the future. That's perfectly fine for a non-profit to do - they really are just a corporation that doesn't pay out profits to shareholders, they keep it all internally. Examples: the Susan Komen foundation. College endowments. Hospitals. Etc. In my time at a non-profit, we had what we called our "contribution margin" which was equivalent to profit in a for-profit company, and that was tens of millions of dollars a year. Like I said, we had big real-estate holdings etc which is where all the profit went year-over-year. And we actually did do important public health work, but we were also essentially a contractor for various state and federal agencies and definitely did turn a profit. The only requirement in the US is that at least 5% of the activity must be charitable in nature - that's not a typo. So spend 5% on some studies and reports and the rest becomes your personal slush fund. It's a fantastic little arrangement. https://www.ncfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Five-Percent-Minimum-Payout-Requirement-COF-2000-the-five-percent-minimum-payout-requirement.pdf https://www.ncfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Five-Per...
    - mattbee 5y ago
      Yeah that's not at all the same thing as a UK charity, which has to spend all of its money on charitable purposes. They are governed by a board of volunteer, unpaid trustees who can be personally liable for its misconduct. Here's the Raspberry Pi Foundation's entry on the register: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/5002372/charity-overview https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/chari...
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  There is no "jack shit" about the Raspberry Pi Foundation's charitable status. It's really not in question. They've even relatively recently split the business in two (Foundation and Trading Company) to further protect the charitable aims of the Foundation and avoid the ugly Ikea situation. There is also (in the UK and in the USA as I understand it) a distinction between not-for-profit and charitable status. In the USA AFAIK most self-declared non-profit organisations follow or are advised to model themselves on the Georgia Nonprofit Corporation code. But not all non-profits are charities (all charities are non-profits, but as you say, it does not mean they don't _make_ profits from time to time; they just don't return them to shareholders). In the UK we have slightly different non-profit codes like the CIC (Community Interest Company). They are very distinct from charities.
jonp888 5y ago
There are two parts of the Raspberry Pi organisation - the Foundation(a charity) and the Trading company(not a charity). The hardware is developed sold by the non-charitable part, and recently announced that they prioritise orders from industrial customers over private ones. You cannot expect them to act like a charity - they aren't one.
- analognoise 5y ago
  The only reason the charitable foundation is able to exist at all is industrial interest, though? That seems fair.

by ethbr0 5y ago

paulmd 5y ago

This is the part where HNers learn that simply being registered as a charity doesn't mean jack shit. Hospital systems that make billions of dollars a year of profit are charities! Companies that own billions of dollars of real estate holdings for no purpose except speculation are charities! Non-profit simply means that profits aren't paid out to shareholders. It doesn't mean you can't make enormous profits and accrue vast amounts of wealth.

samhw 5y ago
Notoriously in England, public schools are charities. My school made god knows how much by offering a few bursaries and thereby counting itself as a charity. My best friend's school, old Slough Comp, is possibly one of the greatest forces of anti-charity and anti-egalitarianism in the country and yet is still - IIRC - a charity. It means absolutely zero whatsoever. Perhaps other countries are different.
- stuaxo 5y ago
  For people in the US "Public School" in the UK are actually private.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    And "Slough Comp" is a tongue in cheek name for Eton College
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >"Public School" in the UK are actually private That's confusing as hell. Can anyone please explain?
    - samhw 5y ago
      Yeah, sure. When they started[0], the aristocracy were educated by private tutors, and these schools actually were for the poor (ok, fine: for 'poor', read 'slightly less than royalty'). That context has obviously changed a lot since, and it now feels a bit silly. Also, while that person's comment is correct, it's worth noting that not all private schools are referred to as public schools. That name is only for the oldest, mostly-boarding schools that were big players when the system was (finally) formalised in the 19th century. The vast majority of private schools would just be called private schools. And then state schools are the genuinely-free ones. [0] ETA: Mostly around the Tudor period I believe; i.e. by Shakespeare's time most if not all of them were well established.
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        Yes -- but also all "Public" schools were not "Church" schools. Basically there is a time when education was almost exclusively monastic; those who were not taught privately were taught by religious institutions. The public schools were free of that influence to a greater extent. There is one more tier of school you don't mention which sits somewhere below "public": the "commercial school". There were some of these owned by the livery companies, and were a tier of schools that were created along the lines of the public schools but before the school system was fully established. Most of them were not fee-paying but were funded by donations or livery company charitable funds. They taught largely vocational skills (but professional ones rather than technical ones); parents sent their kids to commercial schools to bring back the knowledge to professionalise the family business or to set them up in a trade. (I went to a school that was originally founded this way, but was a part-state-owned grammar school by the time I got there a century later)
        samhw 5y ago
        Oh wow, thanks for adding that detail. I didn’t know about practically any of that. That’s a fascinating side of things: I thought there must have been a slight lacuna in my understanding, that not all the educated classes could have employed private tutors, and that definitely fills in a missing link for me. Though it adds another small question: aren’t/weren’t most public schools severely Anglican? I know my school was quite radical at the time for admitting Jewish boys, so that always painted a picture of a not-exactly-super-secular institution, but maybe I’ve got the wrong impression in some way... Also, those commercial schools sound a bit - subtracting for a moment the fee-paying aspect - like the German technical education system which I’ve always liked the sound of. I wish we had something more like that today, though obviously now it wouldn’t - or shouldn’t - be fee-paying.
- OJFord 5y ago
  It doesn't mean 'absolutely zero' - the key point is that it must have charitable aims and objectives which it strives to achieve or encourage. For example, a university student union can sell you beer in the SU bar and run events to raise cash in order to further its aims in education and student experience etc.
- outsb 5y ago
  > It means absolutely zero whatsoever I know you're being dramatic, but at least charities in the UK do have vastly different treatment by HMRC, and much more granular financial reporting requirements. Raspberry Pi foundation annual accounts are here: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-live.ch.gov.uk/docs/CBTw8ypbBIKtolVf1svcpbxuWhrOajn3wU5DG5X_FaA/application-pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAWRGBDBV3CSIPE72Y%2F20220413%2Feu-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20220413T005610Z&X-Amz-Expires=60&X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEKj%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEaCWV1LXdlc3QtMiJHMEUCIQCLavstNj2AZ7Mh8DIGM5iepBday7nPVz9s%2BYXCcmLNcQIgXtJ8NY32aAj62xpMm6N%2F94aLSs7na2EfHvU0OSTplWAq%2BgMIURAEGgw0NDkyMjkwMzI4MjIiDBkjl1QA%2FFNPGilPlCrXAzW%2FZbJeiKkGOQSFNOUEwKjFupuidn1SafxEySUmgXFePK0LeQIVhE9b4IC3d%2FVBBB3fS7FMwpslBp4dw6sOx4bclbKv2NRNv40fXy9ajBC4DCDPSqaGObNNpsyl7IsdFqyV1Q8oP1x2BAtHE2CqQT1aL2ss%2BMyUIV8CFDP8q8Wx%2Bdi%2BoBkI1xkv9aVEArCVIJPvNXBSfySwNZWzgCQrR7Lt2VX4bf63cr19BlcyjaGcgAMw5bPWelsM3gzJELwSonrX8XmorXStIgTyh0HarctRLvgi6ENaXUw3BPTbQei%2FwfpPaeXK54dtEPsFcDkQHNwLu9XgNME6FnoWOohFRtIrDYvoVQVgaNC2svRAxjg%2FzNnOKHL80JJMA%2BvlypIqnOMBqfVrWkgL84JLDC%2BdRPzrKIjz5ThfHcf6gt0P%2FkMFOw1h4wamwxl5TtWjB7lhc%2FaVSxIobnK%2ByfHEsep4G%2B3YdZzX5Jv32O3BwKb9NTr8ywZ9O9tasIs%2B865ZUv%2BOWNH9NlR1DLgGWds26JPeUgy4%2Fom5ASIpirlpa8eCtpW9BhPs5Qn842WV4J%2FDo2JUUTsWDxJl1BRm0nsf40eWtbkgDPXu8EUCGYcpklAWaeIvollZzZCRTjD9nNiSBjqlAW81oklMnc3Qc3Sk5wwIub%2FLAC1uO8mXqd2JYsQ05Y0XzLRPQX2qwDW%2F3VFdGSCdK1%2FNy%2BroVqYHRgdD8qNWK3V2wM1GzP8oLwFCPGQyq%2FjYvlR0NClczaruZzIVDg1om9hOEv20eX7nwc2%2BpZ3D6L2%2F7XaQGmpaxAE92aXANTQCKNwQF7WwTe57H8u962r2gnz8GoKjJdI2aj%2FI3fr2FMdaWUTdKA%3D%3D&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&response-content-disposition=inline%3Bfilename%3D%22companies_house_document.pdf%22&X-Amz-Signature=375c8edf4936fca6cf9e6cc7de01e1d027877c02b585c9a20826edf3c7ce1135 https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-live.... For example we can see one member of staff was taking home more than £290k in 2020 It seems this is a rather profitable business hiding beneath the label of "education exemption"
mattbee 5y ago
A UK registered charity has to have a "public benefit requirement" and has some fierce governance and reporting requirements, it's more than just a non-profit company. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/public-benefit-rules-for-charities https://www.gov.uk/guidance/public-benefit-rules-for-chariti...
- paulmd 5y ago
  It's the same in the US, but in both cases, "public benefit" is nebulous and unenforceable. If you just say "we're advancing public health!" that's a charitable purpose, even if the majority of what you're doing is profit-seeking and completely unrelated to that. Much like how CEOs get wide discretion as to what "advancing shareholder interests" means - maybe it's in the long-term interest of public health to build a huge amount of real-estate holdings that you could (hypothetically) use to generate revenue and advance public health (uh huh) some time in the future. That's perfectly fine for a non-profit to do - they really are just a corporation that doesn't pay out profits to shareholders, they keep it all internally. Examples: the Susan Komen foundation. College endowments. Hospitals. Etc. In my time at a non-profit, we had what we called our "contribution margin" which was equivalent to profit in a for-profit company, and that was tens of millions of dollars a year. Like I said, we had big real-estate holdings etc which is where all the profit went year-over-year. And we actually did do important public health work, but we were also essentially a contractor for various state and federal agencies and definitely did turn a profit. The only requirement in the US is that at least 5% of the activity must be charitable in nature - that's not a typo. So spend 5% on some studies and reports and the rest becomes your personal slush fund. It's a fantastic little arrangement. https://www.ncfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Five-Percent-Minimum-Payout-Requirement-COF-2000-the-five-percent-minimum-payout-requirement.pdf https://www.ncfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Five-Per...
  - mattbee 5y ago
    Yeah that's not at all the same thing as a UK charity, which has to spend all of its money on charitable purposes. They are governed by a board of volunteer, unpaid trustees who can be personally liable for its misconduct. Here's the Raspberry Pi Foundation's entry on the register: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/5002372/charity-overview https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/chari...
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
There is no "jack shit" about the Raspberry Pi Foundation's charitable status. It's really not in question. They've even relatively recently split the business in two (Foundation and Trading Company) to further protect the charitable aims of the Foundation and avoid the ugly Ikea situation. There is also (in the UK and in the USA as I understand it) a distinction between not-for-profit and charitable status. In the USA AFAIK most self-declared non-profit organisations follow or are advised to model themselves on the Georgia Nonprofit Corporation code. But not all non-profits are charities (all charities are non-profits, but as you say, it does not mean they don't _make_ profits from time to time; they just don't return them to shareholders). In the UK we have slightly different non-profit codes like the CIC (Community Interest Company). They are very distinct from charities.

jonp888 5y ago

There are two parts of the Raspberry Pi organisation - the Foundation(a charity) and the Trading company(not a charity). The hardware is developed sold by the non-charitable part, and recently announced that they prioritise orders from industrial customers over private ones. You cannot expect them to act like a charity - they aren't one.

analognoise 5y ago
The only reason the charitable foundation is able to exist at all is industrial interest, though? That seems fair.