What kind of legal status does the company F-Droid have?

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Hi guys!

I have a question to the legal status of F-Droid.

The company behind the F-Droid Store is F-Droid Limited right? But what kind of Limited is it then? Is it an Limited Partnership (LP), Limited Company (Ltd.), Limited Liability Company (LLC) or Limited Liability Partnership (LLP)…?

I could neither find something to this topic on the forum nor the website F-DROID LIMITED overview - Find and update company information - GOV.UK and https://opencollective.com/f-droid#section-about.

Appreciate your help!

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I can’t speak authoritatively, but look at F-DROID LIMITED filing history - Find and update company information - GOV.UK → Incorporation (the oldest item). It appears the answer is “Private (Ltd by Shares)”.

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Thanks! Didn’t see that.

I was just wondering why I couldn’t find the legal status in short form somewhere on the bottom of the website like most companies do. It would definitely improve the public appearance if “Private Company Limited By Shares (Ltd.)” or just “(Ltd.)” was added to the website footer.

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We don’t operate like a company under a single entity, there are multiple legal entities, mostly the companies of the core team who receive grants, donations, and contracts. This is more like how Debian operates than say Nextcloud.

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Got it.

And which other companies are there then besides F-Droid Limited? (the most important)

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some are on the consulting page on the website

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I hope I get it right now:

  • ­ F-Droid (Ltd.) → Core infrastructure, including Hardware and Bandwith, makes donations via IBAN and PayPal possible. Donations over OpenCollective, Liberapay, via Bitcoin, Flattr and the Hellotux T-shirts would be possible without F-Droid (Ltd.)

  • ­ COTECH - Confidential Technologies GmbH → Custom F-Droid deployments, feature extensions, whitelabel solutions

  • ­ IzzySoft (private person, creator & operator of the IzzyOnDroid Repo) → Binary Repositories & Metadata

  • ­ Oliver+Coady (Inc.) → Manages most of the Grants

  • ­ Austrian sole-proprietorship by Hans-Christoph Steiner → Manages other Grants

Summing Up
F-Droid has a diversified structure, because there are different legal entities for different tasks and they don’t operate under one single company but are outsourced to different independent companies or private individuals. All of them working together create the F-Droid we know.

Did I miss something or mix up?

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Sounds right! I think there are a couple other contracts here and there
with other entities that are necessarily public, since I know that core
contributors not listed in your list have done F-Droid related
consulting. I’ll leave that to them to disclose as they see fit. There
have also be contributions from employees of companies as part of their job.

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Oh yeah I forgot people like:

  • Chirayu Desai

  • Ciaran Gultnieks (of course)

  • Danial Behzadi

  • Jochen Sprickerhof

  • Marcus Hoffmann

  • Mathijs van Gorcum

  • Mostafa Ahangarha

  • Ruslan Boitsov

  • Sveinn í Felli

  • Trey Yang

Thank’s for your help!

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What’s the point of all these questions?

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FOSS is big business. Nothing is free. As a business FOSS works best when finances are not transparent,

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RedHat may be big business, F-Droid is certainly not. Very few free software projects get a notable amount of money. My interest in making F-Droid’s finances as transparent as possible is to show how little money F-Droid survives on.

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