Re:Why not a non-profit ASP for nonprofit orgs? (Score 1)

Bruce,

I'm an engineer at a for-profit ASP for non-profits called 4charity.com. The company actually started out as a non-profit one since many of our people came from non-profit backgrounds. However, we realized switching to a to a for profit model made the most sense. There were a number of reasons for this:

• It allowed us to attract top talent and investment money.
• It's very hard to be competitive and move quickly as a non-profit ASP.

There were actually a number of non-profit ASP's over the past year that aren't very active anymore. We think the trick is to operate as a for-profit company while still maintaing the spirit of non-profit ASP -- i.e. excellent service for our non-profit customers with no exploitation.

Open Source certainly fits into this. We've always run many of our internal servers on Linux and BSD. We're now moving to build as many of our core products using Open Source as much as possible. The company is even very supportive of the Open Source projects that many of us work on in our spare time.

We think non-profits are certainly best served by Open Source and occaisonally by a good for-profit company :)

-Matt Tucker
4charity.com