What is a public benefit corporation legally? What kind of tax forms do they fill out?
RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's only true if by "maximize" you don't mean anything like the mathematical maximization of a function. Due to the "business judgement" rule, the management of a for-profit company gets to do business just about any way they want without any legal constraint; all they need is some reasonable rationale for why it might somehow, in the long term, benefit shareholders. This includes giving stuff away and selling stu…
For daily business, sure, a lot of public benefit can be justified monetarily. Of course, there are exceptions, and a PBC would be allowed greater ability to choose. As I understand, another big benefit is the ability to use public benefit as a protection from hostile takeovers from companies that might undermine the PBC's social mission.
All limited liability partnerships have a field of business registered (however broad or vague, but it has to have at least one; some jurisdictions also standardise those fields of business) and you usually need supermajority to split, merge and/or change the registered field and/or name. Or do you mean PBC charter can limit further than business licensure requirements?
Re: RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
#33It's interesting that many tech/product blogs do not easily link back to the parent site. For instance, I didn't know what RStudio was, so I have to go to the address bar and remove the blog portion of the subdomain and the trailing url just to find out what the parent site is, instead of a simple link.
I first thought it's about R-Studio[1] the recovery software. Then I tried the main page and I had doubts. Only after I hovered over the "Products" it says "RStudio - The premier IDE for R" (ok, it also says something in the page title but that's not fully shown in any current browser, and there's a "RStudio Server Pro - Take control of your R code" on the first page, but I did not make the connection)
Re: RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
#34It's interesting that many tech/product blogs do not easily link back to the parent site. For instance, I didn't know what RStudio was, so I have to go to the address bar and remove the blog portion of the subdomain and the trailing url just to find out what the parent site is, instead of a simple link.
That really does annoy me, so often I'll be on blog or support site, and there is no way to get back to the main web page for the service/company.
Looking at you Microsoft Partner center docs... just give me the dashboard!
Re: RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
#35Does this mean you can get a RStudio Pro license for less than $10g a year? Also their sales department might be one of the worst I ever dealt with, so hopefully they'll all get fired.
I think it'd be cheaper to ask the people you spoke with to learn some new communication skills, instead of firing and hiring an entire department. Like, whoa dude. That's waaaay too much paperwork
Re: RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
#36Does this mean you can get a RStudio Pro license for less than $10g a year? Also their sales department might be one of the worst I ever dealt with, so hopefully they'll all get fired.
I think it'd be cheaper to ask the people you spoke with to learn some new communication skills, instead of firing and hiring an entire department. Like, whoa dude. That's waaaay too much paperwork
Asking them to learn some new communication skills would require them to be able to be communicated with at all.
Re: RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
For daily business, sure, a lot of public benefit can be justified monetarily. Of course, there are exceptions, and a PBC would be allowed greater ability to choose. As I understand, another big benefit is the ability to use public benefit as a protection from hostile takeovers from companies that might undermine the PBC's social mission.
All limited liability partnerships have a field of business registered (however broad or vague, but it has to have at least one; some jurisdictions also standardise those fields of business) and you usually need supermajority to split, merge and/or change the registered field and/or name. Or do you mean PBC charter can limit further than business licensure requirements?
PBCs are corporations. Partnerships (at least in the US) are not corporations and work very differently.
Re: RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
#38@hadley Your response to the tidyverse question was quite candid. Thanks for that! Hopefully Rstudio becoming PBC helps a lot of skeptists to support more!
Wow, I’d missed that thread previously. I learned R before the Tidyverse and even before ggplot. I cannot imagine going back to base R.
If I have one regret about the Tidyverse, it’s that Hadley and company don’t have a clone using Racket / Scheme as their tapestry. R got me into FP, but I feel like Racket is a more natural place for the ideas of the tidyverse.
Re: RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
#39It's great that RStudio is changing to a PBC. However from what I've read, being a Benefit Corporation doesn't actually mean anything. - From my reading it's possible for a Benefit Corporation to still be taken over or bought out. - Benefit Corporations can convert back to regular corporations (in contrast with most 501(c)3's which cannot convert to corporations except under very particular circumstances) - Unlike a…
Disclaimer: I'm an RStudio employee. But this post is my personal opinion and not representative of that of RStudio. Separately, I'm also a licensed (non-practicing) attorney; despite that, this isn't legal advice. Some of the things you've said are correct, but are kind of skipping a few important steps. Buyout: Any corporate buyout, particularly of a Delaware corporation, opens the board up to scrutiny and requires…
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It's an area I have been very interested in. Will look at that book.
Re: RStudio becomes a public benefit corporation
#40It's interesting that many tech/product blogs do not easily link back to the parent site. For instance, I didn't know what RStudio was, so I have to go to the address bar and remove the blog portion of the subdomain and the trailing url just to find out what the parent site is, instead of a simple link.
Doh - I filed an issue on our internal tracker to fix this
Thanks for the quick response to this. The "blog that doesn't link back to the main site" might be my biggest pet peeve on the internet today.
"Pet peeve" being a minor but incredibly annoying issue as opposed to a deal-breaker type of issue.