It's my understanding that you cannot get tax-exempt non-profit status purely for developing and distributing software, regardless of license.
It's my understanding that software-oriented tax-exempt organizations, 501(c)(3)s, like the Apache Foundation categorize themselves as educational foundations in order to get tax-exempt status. It's hinted in the article that it's a pain to do FOSS despite altruistic intentions. I'm surprise that this shortcoming of the tax code wasn't underscored more.
If we are serious about getting more funding for open source, we should be lobbying to get FOSS (for some definition) categorized as providing scientific benefit or else add a new category of non-profits that provide free software (for some definition of free).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation