Yorba Foundation was a non-profit software group based in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

, and founded by Adam Dingle wanting to bring first class software to the open source community. This organization had been created to answer people thinking open source brings hard to use, clunky and low-quality software usable only by hackers. The company was made of 5 employees: Jim Nelson (coder and executive director), Adam Dingle (founder), Charles Lindsay, Eric Gregory and Nate Lillich (software engineers).

History

In December 2009, Yorba Foundation applied to get the 501(c)(3) status. After some requests for clarification by

IRS The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting Taxation in the United States, U.S. federal taxes and administerin ...

in June 23, 2010 and September 14, 2010. On May 22, 2014, Yorba's nonprofit status was denied. The IRS explained that the organization makes software that can be used by any person for any purpose, and not just for a specific community. Therefore, Yorba cannot be considered as a charity even though the

Apache Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the A ...

, with exactly the same purpose, was considered a nonprofit. Although this status would have helped, according to Jim Nelson, Yorba's existence didn't hinge on it. On October 31, 2013, Yorba moved from San Francisco's

Mission District The Mission District ( Spanish: ''Distrito de la Misión''), commonly known as the Mission ( Spanish: ''La Misión''), is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California. One of the oldest neighborhoods in San Francisco, the Mission District's name ...

to its

Financial District A financial district is usually a central area in a city where financial services firms such as banks, insurance companies, and other related finance corporations have their headquarters offices. In major cities, financial districts often host ...

. By the end of April 2015, the last Yorba employee, Jim Nelson, left the foundation. After a direct contact with Adam Dingle The stated reason for the closure is lack of financially sustainability: funding ran out, and donations did not match expenses. Even if Yorba had received the 501(c)(3) status allowing it to be tax exempt, it's not likely to have helped much. On October 25, 2015, the following message was posted on their webpage without any further explanation: May 2016 marked the beginning of the formal dissolution of the organization with the complete dissolution happening later that year. In May 2016, Yorba reassigned the copyright of all their software to the

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. (also known as "Conservancy") is an organization that provides a Nonprofit organization, non-profit home, infrastructure support, and legal support for free software, free and open source software projects. The ...

except for their California calendar application which will be assigned in the near future due to an oversight on Yorba's part.

Main developments

Shotwell

Shotwell is an image manager for the GNOME 3 desktop, which features: * Importing from local storage or a camera. * Uploading images to photo sharing services, such as

Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...

and

Tumblr Tumblr (pronounced "tumbler") is a microblogging and Social networking service, social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and is owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content ...

. * Organization by time, keywords, or folders.

References

{{FOSS Organizations established in 2009 Free software project foundations based in the United States Non-profit organizations based in San Francisco 2009 establishments in California Defunct non-profit organizations based in the United States 2015 disestablishments in California Organizations disestablished in 2015