Hi I've been approached now more than once already on Twitter about the possibility to donate to our project. However: We're not having any legal form for the open source project yet and the company can't receive donations because this would be a problem from the legal perspective and taxes and so on. Also it's a problem if I register a society receiving donations and being the CEO of the company doing the commercial part of selling semiconductor products as soon as we've got the open source process working and we can actually also mass manufacture with it...
@Hagen: Do you wanna talk with Tobias about registering a society (Verein) in Berlin for LibreSilicon where the Wau Holland Stiftung could collect donations for and transfer to that society? Then this society could basically pay Lanceville to develop the open source process and could also buy development boards which we could give out for free to Hackers at the congress.
However, since you will be holding shares in the company as well we should maybe appoint someone else (for instance Tobias) as the founder of the society, so that no legislator develops the idea that we would have criminal intends.
Especially because of the fact that we're working on developing a free process and technology node might at some point be reason enough for some lawyers of big proprietary and evil foundries to try eliminate this unpleasant backdoor free competition, and such a legal thing might be the welcome cross-hair they're looking for.
So we have to make sure that there is nothing with this where someone could construct a legal case with and hang us with it.
Cheers David