OpenVoiceOS is going nonprofit association and we are looking for help and support

Dear all, I think this is the best place where to find enthusiasts interested in Voice Assistants. Myself I am a user of Home Assistant and Mycroft (first, now OpenVoiceOS). The original post from @j1nx can be found here.

OpenVoiceOS (OVOS) is a collective of programmers and hardware enthusiasts. We formed in 2019-2020 as an offshoot of this great Mycroft community, bringing a handful of third-party projects under one roof. One of those projects was an extension of Mycroft itself, which slowly became independent of its parent. Our great history can be found on these forums as well;

Over the years, with their employers’ consent, those of us paid to work on relevant projects migrated to the OVOS codebase, which enabled those members to spend company time on our open-source projects. In this roundabout fashion, the OVOS assistant, which will receive a name of its own in the coming weeks, became an accidental fork of Mycroft. We’ve been operating in this manner for over two years without giving the arrangement much thought.

With MycroftAI reduced to a skeleton crew , and the transfer of most development operations to Neon, our ecosystem has been abruptly reduced to projects which had already switched to our code. Neon derives from our code. KDE derives from our code. We are aware of no other Mycroft-based projects in production.

If Neon represents the future of Mycroft’s commercial operations, OpenVoiceOS represents the survival of the adjacent open-source community, and our maintained code is every project’s best hope for the future. Circumstances have made it abundantly clear that, although we’re fortunate to enjoy an extremely friendly relationship with our members’ employers, we’re just as fortunate to have endured this period intact. Such an informal relationship with the world at large is no longer tenable.

We’ve decided to become a nonprofit association under Dutch law. OpenVoiceOS will be registered as OpenVoiceOS V.z.w. (Dutch: “Vereninging zonder winstoogmerk”, a nonprofit association, as distinguished from a foundation.) The association will support the OVOS community in legal and financial matters by securing donations of cash, hardware, and other relevant aid. These donations will be used to facilitate software development, promotion, and support.

To establish the association and equip it with a positive balance for ongoing expenses, we have determined that we need to raise €3033. We’re deeply grateful for any support. You can chip in at our GoFundMe campaign;

https://www.gofundme.com/f/openvoiceos

Please feel free to approach us with any questions or concerns. You can expect to hear more from us over the next few weeks, as we finalize our plans for long-term stability, a more structured development process, and much more!

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Hi, there. Thank you very much for sharing. Very much appreciated.

As stated above. Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions, comments or concerns you might have.

I would like to add that, for people that would like to better understand what this legal entity “association” means exactly. It is the equivalent of what the good folks at KDE use.

https://ev.kde.org/

That website actually explains it better then I would ever be able to.

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