Category: MetaBrainz

I’m now over two weeks behind in posting the finances for June — please bear with me, while I battle PayPal a bit. I’ve been using their export to QuickBooks feature to download the transactions for all the donations we’ve been receiving. But, for some unknown reason, that option is no longer available — only export to tab/comma delimited files, and QuickBooks can’t import those files.

I’d have to write a converter that takes CSV files and translates them into quickbooks files — something I am trying to avoid. Thus I am waiting for a reply back from PayPal about what’s going on.

If this is not resolved by next week, I’ll go write the script and get our finances back on track.

UPDATE: PayPal permanently removed this feature, with no explanation as to why — I guess we join the ranks of people who have gotten screwed by PayPal. I just wish they would’ve notified me. Grrr.

Matthew Exon asked a few great questions about the MetaBrainz Foundation launch, and I wanted to share my answers with everyone here on this blog:

On Apr 19, 2005, at 3:58 AM, Matthew Exon wrote:

> Congratulations! This is certainly a big step for MusicBrainz, and I’m

> sure it gives all of us a greater feeling of confidence and

> responsibility about the whole project.

Thanks — I’m glad to hear that. I’m trying to project that on a much larger scale. To the point where corporations get that sense too.

> The teasers on the test MetaBrainz page over the last couple of weeks

> have raised some questions for me, so this is my chance to ask if you

> could clarify some of them for me. I don’t expect full dissertations

> to

> turn up on the MetaBrainz site overnight, and I guess it would be

> prudent for you not to respond to some things here, but you might be

> interested to know what questions occur to this punter in the street.

Do you mind if I post this response to the MB blog? Your questions a excellent and until I can have a fully articulated position on the licenses, I’d like to have something to refer to.

Continue reading “Questions about the MetaBrainz launch”

Gordon Mohr, who is currently working at the Internet Archive was given the opportunity to donate $300 to a non-profit with a compatible mission to the Internet Archive. Gordon chose the MetaBrainz Foundation and thus we just received a check for $300.

Thank you very much to both Gordon and Brewster Kahle, the driving force behind the Internet Archive!

In other news, we just received our official tax-exempt notification from the IRS — this can take months or even years. With the skilled help from our lawyers we were able to do it in just over 5 weeks of time — amazing.

Now that we’re completely in business, we will make an announcement to this effect sometime in January — stay tuned!

The IRS has just acknowledged our non-profit tax exempt application that I filed on October 29:

And with this, I should finally be able to turn on the Amazon associate ids for the site, so we can start earning a little bit more money. And there is also a Cafe Press t-shirt we can start selling. Stay tuned!

At long last, after many hours of work and months of time passing, I’ve FedEx’ed off the 1023 Application to the IRS. The 1023 form is the tax-exempt application to the IRS — once we get an advance ruling on our status (the final ruling will come many months down the road) we’ll be able to conduct business as a real non-profit and start handing out tax-deductible receipts for the donations we receive for MusicBrainz.

I feel confident that we’re well setup — this is mainly due to the excellent guidance I’ve received from Randy Heinig at Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum Perlman & Nagelberg LLP in Chicago. Thank you very much Randy for all your patience, hard work and thorough understanding of what MusicBrainz does!

Hopefully this will also mark the point where I can spend a little less time on the non-profit and start hammering out more code for MusicBrainz — it’s sorely needed. But before I dream of that, we still need to announce this new venture. Stay tuned for more on that!

I’ll jump in right now and update you on my progress.

I just dropped the FTB3500 tax-exempt application to the State of California into the mail. This application is one of the two big ones that took many weeks of preparing and creating budget forecasts for the next two years. Budgets are not my strength, but our Treasurer helped me with this process and we got it done. Next up is the biggest and most dreaded form — the 1023 application to the IRS.

I’ve also got the first cut at the MetaBrainz web site created — this site will detail everything about the non-profit including all donations and finances, board of directors and other non-profit stuff. Of course the new web-site is not going to be public until we’re ready to announce every last detail of the new non-profit. Stay tuned!

Oh, yeah — I also created this blog this week. Maybe tomorrow I can start hacking on advanced Picard features.