Jonathan Dowland <j...@debian.org> writes: > Correct me if I'm wrong, but Debconf is not formally a part of Debian, > and so cannot be bound by the outcome of a GR anyway.
This is the sort of thing that would be good to clear up as part of the process of making Debian a more formal organization. I don't want to harp on this too much, but this sort of informality can be rather dangerous under US law because there are all sorts of unwanted liability implications to not having anything formally in writing that creates limited liability and shields people from personal liability. I suspect the same or similar problems may exist in other countries as well. There are a bunch of different ways we could structure this that don't necessarily have to involve putting DebConf in the same organization as Debian, but we really should have some formal and legal setup and agreement. For example, some conventions that move all over the world form a local legal organization each year that has an agreement with some permanent standing organization so that the convention liability can be isolated from the parent organization (which given all the things that can go wrong with a large physical gathering may be a good idea). Anyway, a lawyer familiar with non-profit law and with conventions (which are fairly common for non-profit organizations) will probably have helpful opinions about all of this and likely would be able to advise us how to make everything more robust. I'm sure they see similar problems regularly; a non-profit dedicated to a particular purpose that holds associated conventions in various countries each year is a fairly common setup (I can think of two or three others just off the top of my head). Maybe Software in the Public Interest is sufficient and they could tell us that (although I'm dubious). It's hard to shake the feeling that we've just gotten quite lucky over the lifetime of the project (which is not very surprising; liability problems are one of those "low likelihood, high impact" kinds of issues), and shouldn't rely on that luck continuing. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>