How can we structure these organisations from creation so that this cannot happen?
freenode believed the purchaser promises. What should they have done differently?
By comparison, many other European countries (Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, …) have specific types of legal entities for associations that have appropriate restrictions on what can be done with them. For example, they can generally not be sold, are required to be internally democratic with fixed statutes, usually (but not always) have open membership and an elected board. I think that would go a long way to fixing these recurrent issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization_laws_by...
however most of the off-the-shelf Articles tend to be completely unrestricted (for obvious reasons)
As I understand it you can set all those things up in an American non-profit and many do in fact have that setup. So it's not a shortcoming of the legal system but of the people who created the entity. They chose not to do those things and no one objected strongly enough.
On other other hand, when I read "Signal Messenger LLC" or similar I have no way of easily knowing whether the organization is in fact set up in such a way.
In order to be an non-profit organization you need an founding meeting, board elections and all of it have to be notarized and drawn up by an attorney before being validated by the state an process that takes weeks if not months where as anyone can set up an company online in about 15 minutes.
For some European nations the processes are far more similar and as code civil courts can do their own fact finding you don't need to pay an notary to validate everything or have an attorney draw up a whole bunch of documentation just to found an small non-profit association.
The cost of having a model set of a constitution and doing the paperwork is as simple as doing the same for a limited liability private company.
I know multiple people who have set up non-profits on their own, without any lawyers, and have not had any difficulties throughout the process.
Do note, though, that it's insufficient to be a "non-profit" in order to become a "charity". Also, we have more than one type of limited company, and some are more amenable to community interest than others. A company limited by shares will likely have either concentrated or tradable ownership, while a company limited by guarantee is more likely to have a wider membership without so much economic interest.
Going in the other direction, the charity I chair isn't a company at all -- we're an unincorporated association. Which isn't usually the best structure for a charity nowadays, but we make do with what we have.
Is there a reason your members aren't interested in incorporating? Protection from individual liability is huge.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130322063238/http://blog.freen...
This isn't true in the UK. There's a structure called a Company Limited by Guarantee, which has no shareholders so it can't be sold. It's an association.
These are quite common, and in fact Freenode Limited is one. It was never "sold" in any conventional sense. There is no owner of Freenode Limited, but Andrew Lee is currently the only voting member so he has full control.
There's one more structure that's (so far) exclusive to the UK: the Charitable Incorporated Organisation [1].
It can be founded as either a foundation (trustees and voting members are the same) or association (usually a larger group of voting members).
The key advantage of a CIO versus a CLG are the less onerous compliance requirements, which go a long way towards keeping smaller charities cheaper to run.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_incorporated_organi...
A pure CLG doesn't have the charitable tax benefits but it's still a non-profit governance structure, and you only have to file with Companies House and HMRC. The CLG is the lowest-hassle non-profit structure.
(Confusingly, CLGs can also be charities - because charitable status can act as a "wrapper" around other corporate structures - and indeed a lot of charities are CLGs because the CIO is a more recent invention.)
I wrote about this, ages ago, I think it's mostly still correct:
https://russ.garrett.co.uk/2009/10/25/starting-a-non-profit-...