Very cool, Henrik. Thanks for the help in this area, it is much appreciated.
patrick On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 5:51 PM, Henrik Ingo <[email protected]>wrote: > 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 >
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