I recommend bringing up these questions on the numfocus mailing list
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/numfocus. They'll give you
much better answers, but my basic understand is:
- There are other advantages to being under NumFOCUS than just fiscal
support (e.g., legal support, like if someone were to sue you guys
over some patent infringement in your code).
- If you ever foresee yourselves receiving any nontrivial amount of
money, fiscal support is important. The reason is that NumFOCUS is a
nonprofit, so the money would be tax free. If you received it
personally (say, if Jason just put it in a bank account), it would be
taxed as income. SymPy lost a decent chunk of money the first year we
did GSoC to taxes because we weren't under GSoC yet.
Aaron Meurer