[TUHS] President's Report: August 2026

[Warren Toomey via TUHS]

Back in June I brought the news that we had formed an incorporated 
organisation, TUHS Inc. 
<https://www.tuhs.org/Governance/tuhsi_faq.html>, to handle the 
donations that you sent in and also to create a formal structure to keep 
TUHS going long into the future. At the time I promised monthly updates 
on our activities; alas, there hasn't been enough news to report 
monthly. So here is the next update!

We've been struggling to open a bank account for the donations that you 
sent in April. We would rather not open a "bricks and mortar" bank 
account as their exchange rates can be high. At the same time, the 
on-line institutions like Wise and Airwallex have an aversion to 
business accounts for incorporated organisations that are not charities. 
Lastly, the Australian Tax Office may want to tax our income as we are 
not a registered charity.

Having discovered of the above, we have chosen to apply with the 
Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission 
<https://www.acnc.gov.au/> to register TUHS Inc. as a charity. Our 
application was filed last week and the ACNC has a six- to eight-week 
turnaround time on applications. So now we wait for their response. If 
our application is successful, we will be able to get a Wise/Airwallex 
account and we will also not have to pay any taxes. Fingers crossed!

While doing the charity application, I came across this definition of a 
museum from the International Council of Museums 
<https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/>:

    A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service
    of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and
    exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public,
    accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and
    sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically,
    professionally and with the participation of communities, offering
    varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and
    knowledge sharing.

I think that perfectly sums up what TUHS is all about. We collect, 
conserve and interpret Unix artifacts, we are open to the public and we 
have an excellent community (the TUHS mailing list) to share our Unix 
knowledge.

On the server side of things, we are still working on migrating the TUHS 
services from our existing Linux server to a new FreeBSD server. We now 
have our own DNS servers, ns1.tuhs.org and ns2.tuhs.org which hold the 
tuhs.org domain records.

As you know, I personally have a "hidden" archive of Unix-related 
material which I haven't been able to release for legal and copyright 
reasons. If TUHS Inc. gets recognised as a museum, this might open up 
opportunities to allow some access to this material. We have been 
researching policies to cover the acquisition and use of material 
protected by legal ownership rights. What we really need is to get 
advice from some intellectual property experts, If you have any links, 
references or contacts w.r.t. IP experts, please let us know.

Finally, we are working on a scalable mechanism to allow people to 
donate material to us.

That's all the news for now. Hopefully, in a few weeks, I will be able 
to report on our application for charity status.

Cheers, Warren