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  • Flarum Foundation, 1: the why and who

Flarum is a project owned by Toby Zerner. His first commit dates back to December 2014.

commit 74db323f83116087e773d23c3b547bc6627c1956
Author: Toby Zerner <>
Date:   Sat Dec 20 16:56:46 2014 +1030

    Hello world!

Toby, Franz Liedke and many contributors worked on Flarum tirelessly yet intermittently. Almost five years later Flarum is running in production for communities of different shapes and sizes and the adoption rate is only increasing. A stable release hasn't seen the light of day so far.

It was time for change. We had to battle the status quo of seeing Flarum as a hobbyist project. If we don't take this seriously, why would others? Since the beginning of this year we have been thinking, researching, networking and discussing our options. As a consequence, Toby left the team, which did take us all by surprise. Nevertheless we didn't falter in our reflection and have begun our professionalization improvements.

Yes, Flarum, as an organization, is levelling up.

A cornerstone of our future is to secure the project under a non-profit company. This would allow shared ownership of Flarum intellectual property, including the logo and copyrights. To do this properly I reached out to several people with connections or knowledge in the field of law. They all pointed me to a widely acclaimed lawyer with an expertise in internet law, Arnoud Engelfriet. I pulled a rascal move and contacted him explaining our situation. I didn't expect he would offer any immediate assistance, but to my surprise he did! He will be personally assisting the legal set up of the Flarum Foundation.

The Flarum Foundation will be formed under Dutch law with the following board members:

For simplicity sake we will stick to these three and don't have voting members. Future additions to the board and alterations to our legal representation are more than likely.

The challenge right now is to define our bylaws and push forward with transferring the project from Toby.

Definitely a move in the right direction. Let me know if I can assist in any way

    [deleted] we can always use staff with specific skills or interests, we can also always use financial support via our open collective.

    7 days later

    Fantastic news and smart moves!

    Also really, really good to hear that Arnoud has offered his help. He is indeed the Dutch expert when it comes to IT related legal matters. Whoo!

    11 days later

    This is a fantastic move! I really like the direction you guys are moving! I'd like to know about the financial funding of the organization if I may. Excuse the basic question, as I've never been into topics related to law.

    By the way, I can help with translations to Indian Languages. I know Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, and Tamizh languages in the order of proficiency. Looking for some documentation on where I can start.

      SHC This is a fantastic move! I really like the direction you guys are moving! I'd like to know about the financial funding of the organization if I may. Excuse the basic question, as I've never been into topics related to law.

      The costs involved for setting up legally are taken from our open collective budget. I'm exceptionally proud that we haven't required to rely on our own investments for quite a while.

      In addition to this "casual" sponsoring, we'll also publish partner packages as soon as the Foundation exists for companies interested in building a long term relationship with Flarum. We have tentatively reached out to a few companies to gauge their interest in such a partnership already.

      Sorry to disturb ^^ if there is a way to a have a monthly paiment to participate to the foundation and gain credits for premium extension when they're release perhaps it will be interesting or ask for some help for custom configuration, build a functionnality and way around ( sorry for this bad english ).

        mrnemesys Flarum currently doesn't have any official marketplace or any official paid extensions, so we can't offer this kind of perk at this time. flagrow.io/Extiverse is a separate entity with a different business model.

        Premium Flarum support might be something introduced in the future.

        SHC By the way, I can help with translations to Indian Languages. I know Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, and Tamizh languages in the order of proficiency. Looking for some documentation on where I can start.

        This is the official localization documentation https://flarum.org/docs/extend/i18n.html, but the best to get started with a language pack might be to contribute to an existing one, or check out the source code of another language to see how it's done.

        Also you might be interested in https://discuss.flarum.org/d/20912-looking-for-translators-for-a-pilot

        • SHC likes this.
        5 days later
        luceos changed the title to Flarum Foundation, 1: the why and who .