After the NixOS Foundation board rotation was announced in early March, the new board has been busy. We’d like to give insight into what’s happened since the appointment, many points of which are not very exciting, but some highlights are marked in bold.
March 2025
- Just after the board rotation was decided, previous board member @ron and the new board members @infinisil, @lassulus and @ra33it0 (@ryantrinkle couldn’t make it) happened to attend PlanetNix in Los Angeles together, where @ron gave the State of the Union talk, with a brief section by @infinisil to introduce the elected Steering Committee (SC) (9:00) and the new board (10:50). During PlanetNix, the present board members also briefly had an ad-hoc meeting to get better acquainted with each other and discuss priorities.
- From March through April, @edolstra legally registered all new board members, while unregistered ex-board members (waiting to unregister himself until everything else is transferred). This unexpectedly took longer because a bug in the online form didn’t allow registering German residents, so he had to send snail-mail letters for our new German board members instead. But now we can confirm that all new board members are registered.
- Starting in March but continuing to this day, the various foundation accounts are being transferred to new board members. We didn’t know the list from the start, but it includes Reconi, E-boekhouden, Bunq, Wise, PayPay, Stripe, Benevity, OpenCollective, SumUp, Gandi, EU F&T, GSoC, Payoneer, Mails, GitHub, Notion, Google Drive and more. Many of these are rather tedious and involve sending passports/selfies, confirmations by SMS and Mail, printing/signing/sending physical letters, downloading apps, talking to support, making payments and more. We are creating some internal-for-now documentation on the purpose of all the accounts, how they’re used and tied together and more, and are preparing it to be published in the foundation repo soon. Overall the board transition is going great and will soon be completed. Huge thanks to @edolstra for keeping many NixOS foundation matters running smoothly until the new board is ready!
- Now that we have a well-defined separation of responsibilities for the board and the SC, we moved/cleaned up the foundation repository’s issues accordingly.
- In March and April, we’ve worked out NixCon sponsorship tiers and a process and got it approved by the NixCon organisers, board and SC. At this point in time, we have more than a dozen companies interested in sponsoring NixCon!
- Starting in March but continuing to this day, we’re considering switching to another bank, because our current one, Bunq, only allows people living in the EEA to get access, which only applies to a single new board member (Only @lassulus in Germany, while @ra33it0 recently moved from Germany to Switzerland). Currently the best option seems to be ING, but we’re happy for other suggestions.
April 2025
- In April and May, @infinisil had a regular weekly meeting with @edolstra to make effective progress on transferring the various foundation accounts and responsibilities.
- @infinisil and @ra33it0 made a very short visit to Amsterdam to get registered for a BSN (Dutch citizen service number, even though we’re not citizen!), which is required for some digital operations with the government. Furthermore, they briefly met up with @edolstra to transfer the physical document archive to @infinisil.
- The website team page was updated with board member affiliation, while the foundation README was updated to reflect past members.
- A privacy policy for the NixCon website was written and reviewed by the board
- After getting all the context transferred, some outstanding grant payments for GSoC 2024 are finally being addressed.
- After the initial community-led Framework partnership last year, we renewed the Framework partnership on more official terms, resulting in getting sponsored hardware for the new NixOS Hardware team, as well as a sponsored desktop machine for a binary cache at NixCon 2025!
- Together with some new board members, @edolstra did the quarterly VAT report to show how it’s done. Fun fact: Depending on the activities in the quarter, this involves up to three different submission portals!
- Furthermore, @edolstra is still working to close off the financial situation from before 2024, which turned out to be a bit unfortunate, because the foundation is required to pay corporate tax for a number of years, which requires reconciling some financial uncertainties before it can be concluded. We’ve thought a lot about how to avoid having to pay corporate tax going forward, either by making sure the foundation doesn’t accumulate too much profit to stay below the threshold (it’s a non-profit after all!) or by getting recognised as an ANBI (public benefit organisation) which allows deducting donations from profit and as well as tax benefits for donors.
- Starting in April, we’ve made an effort to project the foundation’s financials for this year. While we don’t have a super clear oversight yet, we’ve accumulated a lot more context since the beginning and are now comfortable enough to make some conservative budget decisions.
- There’s no conclusion yet, but we’ve discussed what to do with our OpenCollective, because it seems like there’s just 200k sitting around, when really that number is completely off. This is because almost all expenses the foundation has are not tracked in OpenCollective and there’s no built-in way to synchronise expenses. We’ll have to revisit this with more clarity on financials.
- (as well as items that were previously mentioned to continue into this month)
May 2025
- While our German board members were registered as board members and UBO’s together due to the snail mail, the same wasn’t the case for the other new members. Using newly acquired access to digital services, we were able to finish the UBO registrations for all new board members.
- After noticing the struggle of managing the incoming foundation emails and a semi-successful experiment with n8n in April, we started managing email using Freescout, which has been very successful so far at making sure emails get handled properly. Other teams that depend on email are also being onboarded.
- After being unsure about the VAT situation for NixCon 2025 tickets (since it’s in Switzerland), we reached out to various consultants and ended up getting great free advice by BDO, who confirmed that we won’t have to pay VAT for ticket sales in Switzerland, since we’re below the required minimum turnover. This has unblocked the NixCon 2025 ticket sales.
- After being made aware of some companies desire to sponsor Nix projects outside of events, we’re working to establish general sponsorship tiers, which could include linked logos on the website and blog/newsletter shout-outs.
- Since last year, the foundation’s physical address is from a provider that we pay to scan and forward the incoming letters by email. This month we renewed the contract by another 2 years (the maximum) to keep it
- We started tracking NixCon 2025 financials in an OpenCollective project. While it’s not fully up-to-date since ticket payments are hard to synchronise, it allows organisers to easily submit expenses and roughly see how much funding is available.
- (as well as items that were previously mentioned to continue into this month)
June 2025
- The event funding limits were adjusted while we’re evaluating the financials and priorisation of funding.
- After becoming increasingly aware that the foundation’s accounting has not received as much love as it should in recent years, and nobody among the board has both the time and experience to get ahead, we’ve decided to search for a professional accountant to handle this for us. This is still on-going, but we are about to receive some offers for consideration.
- We’re in communications regarding a hardware partnership with Ampere.
- We’re in discussions to get financial support for the security tracker expenses.
- We’re working to get a
funding.jsonfor https://floss.fund/ on the website. - Now that we’re somewhat established, we’re internally tracking and regularly refining a few focus items for priorisation with achievable 2-week goals, delegating as much as possible to individual board members.
- On relatively short notice we reviewed and signed a lost NGI agreement in time for an audit.
- Having established better financial projections, we’re able to allocate €10k for marketing efforts from July to the end of the year, with the goal of being able to sustain the marketing and other teams efforts with continuous funding. We’re talking with the marketing team on the specifics on allocation.
- (as well as items that were previously mentioned to continue into this month)
Continuous
In addition to all of the items mentioned above, we’ve also been taking care of:
- @lassulus: Day-to-day finances and accounting, including events, infra, NixCon and NGI grant payments
- @ra33it0: NixCon 2025 sponsor invoices and confirmations
- @infinisil: Meeting notes, documentation and optimising processes
- @ron: Nunning board prioritization/strategy, maintaining/producing various relations and partnerships
- @ryantrinkle: Legal review and support
We’d also like to give a shout-out to @kate for supporting us with administration and accounting!
Conclusion
While there’s still lots to do, we’re on a great course so far. We hope this post gives you a good insight into foundation operations, stay tuned for future updates.
Feel free to leave a reply with your thoughts here, but for more sensitive or important matters we recommend reaching out to foundation@nixos.org instead, thank you!
