Hi all One of the things discussed during Drizzle developer day (last Friday) was to move Drizzle into an umbrella non-profit foundation. This will give clarity and solidify the legal status of the project.
The common advice is to not create your own foundation, and I agree, I tried once and it was weeks of full time work by 2 persons. However, generic "umbrella" foundations exist which you can join with very little overhead. Last year I looked into this topic and my recommendation to Brian was Software in Public Interest, which in my opinion has a good reputation and is very low key, flexible, low overhead organization. This proposal was accepted by those present in Santa Clara. I will be moving forward this process in the next few days. In the meantime I thought I could also share some facts about SPI and what this means. Links: http://www.spi-inc.org/about/ http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/ http://spi-inc.org/projects/associated-project-howto/ The last link is the most important one. In short, SPI is a US "public benefit" corporation, aka non-profit foundation or charity. Projects join the SPI umbrella by approval of the SPI board. The SPI can then hold "assets" for the project, which in our case means things like Drizzle trademark, drizzle.org, launchpad project pages, possibly hardware, stickers, etc... and also money, if someone wants to donate some to Drizzle. For US tax-payers donations are tax deductible, this (theoretically, if valuated) includes also donations of HW or cloud-compute time. (Monty Taylor commented that there is no way to "move" project pages on launchpad to something like SPI, and this is true. This is purely a legal thing with no practical effect. Same is true for drizzle.org domain, someone still needs to manage the domain and make sure we continue to pay for it, but SPI will become the legal owner.) The SPI does with these assets whatever the project wants to do with them, while taking care of accounting and other boring stuff. They act based on requests from the "Project Liaison", which essentially controls all of the assets. For small projects the liaison is often a self-appointed person like the project creator, whereas larger projects (PostgreSQL and Debian) have formal election procedures for selecting a Secretary or Treasurer. The consensus in Santa Clara was to opt for the lightweight process for now (which is essentially benevolent dictator kind of model), as Drizzle grows I will be suggesting something like copying PostgreSQL governance structure at some point in the future (probably years from today). Known SPI projects are Debian, PostgreSQL and freedesktop.org, plus a dozen smaller ones. It's a good group to join. (The flexibility is shown by openoffice.org also being a project, even if this is really a Sun/Oracle owned product... go figure. Also some other projects have their own parallel foundations while also remaining under SPI.) A good thing to emphasize is that moving to SPI is somewhat irreversible. SPI allows projects to move their assets to another 501(c)3 non-profit within the US. This could be a future Drizzle foundation or another umbrella foundation. It is however impossible to move assets back to a for-profit universe or anywhere outside the US. This follows from the tax-deductible 501(c)3 status. I will be contacting SPI board and connecting them to Brian shortly. Thereafter I assume there will be some token amount of paperwork for individuals who we'll identify as current owners for Drizzle "assets" that I listed above. henrik -- [email protected] +358-40-8211286 skype: henrik.ingo irc: hingo www.openlife.cc My LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=9522559 _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
