Maybe an initiative could take money to encourage/hire already existing developers to do work defined by the initative. Maybe we could even hire contractors from jolla for that.
The latter would have the obvious benefit that they already know what they are doing and we would be in close communication with jolla.
The downsite would be obviously that this wouldnt be an investment with a possible return but just spent money
thanks for offer, but in my country its pita to receive payments, everything is blocked…
@coderus is it possible to use Alipay in Russia? Its chinese, so it cannot be sanctioned. I seems to be everywhere, i could pay with it in a discounter… 
iirc alipay is based on WU, so blocked. we should get unipay soon
Because I’ve mentioned this in another context without linking back here, just to push the thread in the history.
Things I thought of today;
I’m going to go speak to some organization people who are specialized in this to get some advice.
Pan European (as a start) org. Is there such a thing for the purposes of tax exemption?
If it’s about tax exemption, foundation should be in several countries tax-free.
What are the goals.
It’s the most important part. In the NGO/foundation/association’s statutes it shouldn’t be too specific, but something like supporting financially open-source software for mobile phone. I prefer to support and improve Sailfish, but we never know what the future be like.
I’m going to go speak to some organization people who are specialized in this to get some advice.
Really good news ! If possible, it could be great to organize a (virtual) meetup to discuss about it.
Let’s see if I can get the input without it costing a fortune Sadly, but for good reason, the people I know are generally booked and well paid for advice. But asking questions at this stage doesn’t cost anything…
European grants seem possible for me. Tge EU was also financing some research and development done by Nokia in the good old times, and is currently striving for independence from the global players especially in the cloud and storage area, but likely also regarding mobility services.
The EU can only finance things with money they stole. I love SFOS but would not want it to run with stolen money (taxes)
Thank you for pushing it forward!
As discussed earlier regarding map APIs, ideally we should have a system that would allow us, users, to pay for used map access. Some kind of proxy between consumers and map service providers. This shouldn’t be limited to SFOS apps. Same issue is on other platforms and why not have it supporting Android. Any open-source map client could benefit from having ability to link users with the service providers. Maybe some other services as well, like TTS for example.
This is somewhat different from annual donation scheme that would indiscriminately support users access. Whether it can be combined (donations + making money stream from consumers to providers), I don’t know.
I think it’s technically mostly extortion not theft but that’s maybe even more of an incentive to try to channel some of it out of their clutches and into Sailfish 
I support a cooperation, only if the entity will have a say in the future development of the Sailfish OS and of course a share of the future earnings. Charity(I include here also EU or other political financial “help”) is never working!
In this situation, a cooperative will never be able to impose its vision every time and force Jolla to implement the needs/wishes of a minority owner. At the moment, it is not possible to buy shares in Jolla.
We have to be aware that we are not the only customers and that everyone has different needs. I like the current approach. Namely to support the SailfishOS developer community. Where a cooperative can be interesting is in lobbying to direct and accelerate the development of important features for the benefit of the cooperative members.
Most likely it will not, unless it’s big enough to buy Jolla out
Setting unrealistic goals right from the start would only ensure the project to be guaranteed to fail.
It can be big enough! But what’s the point to give Jolla money (besides our licenses), if we have the same old bugs from Release to Release? If we give money, without conditions, we validate the current management strategy, which is obviously not the best.
This is why it is important to define the aims of the cooperative. By being well structured, it would be possible to be efficient. There is nothing to prevent the cooperative from collaborating with Jolla and allowing a freelance developer to be paid to collaborate with Jolla but to perform tasks for the cooperative.
I believe it’s certainly possible to organize an umbrella org. that executes discrete functions but benefits from shared resources. Whether it’s appropriate I’m sill mulling over. The main advantages:
But it might still make sense to have another legal structure.
I just realized that I had neglected to look at the state of the ubports foundation, which is a least a reasonable reference. Anyone have a contact?
For reference, the original in German only: https://ubports.com/web/content/8250?download=1 and a DeepL version http://poetaster.de/misc/UbportsSatzungen.en-GB.pdf
And before I forget this one again, I had looked in this direction for another purpose last year:
Manjaro, F-Droid, among others use it.