On Dec 11, 2007, at 2:20 PM, Shawn Walker wrote: > Right. I was referencing Roy's implications that many of the areas of > control had been defined during the charter definition process. > > He implied that there was a full definition that was private to OGB > members and that was not publicly available.
No I did not. You implied it was private. I just said it took place. I don't know which of the four or five recorded archive locations, genunix history, forums, or notes has it in public form, nor do I care to speculate. Since I wrote that part of the constitution (with full awareness of the charter) and it was agreed to by Sun (with full awareness of what infrastructure we were talking about), your issue has been resolved simply by me telling you what it means. Trust has nothing to do with it (go ask a lawyer). The fact that you continue to banter on about the subject will not make it any more or less resolved, nor is the present OGB capable of reinterpreting the meaning of past agreements between the OGB and Sun without making a change to the constitution to change those words or have Sun change the charter directly. The only entity with sufficient standing to disagree with my statement is Sun itself and we have no power over Sun to resolve such disagreement short of dissolving the charter and starting over. In any case, Sun has not disagreed, so this whole day has been wasted pandering to your whims rather than to a real concern. The issue is resolved: the charter's limitation on control over Sun's assets and resources refers specifically to the legal and accounting notions of ownership/assignment of assets; it does not contradict the OGB's full and complete power to make or delegate policy decisions regarding what is published on the opensolaris.org infrastructure, provided of course that such publication does not violate applicable laws, regulations, etc. Any trademark owner, such as Sun, has the ability to license the use of their trademarks to anyone, including an informal association of individuals that have not been incorporated as a legal entity, and the charter is one such license by virtue of its creation of OpenSolaris as an organization. That is a license, not a transfer or assignment, which is why the disclaimer is necessary in the charter and also in the constitution (without the disclaimer, a lawyer might have interpreted such a signed document to be an assignment). There is no conspiracy, there is nothing more to read into it, and anything more on the subject would have been a waste of words because Sun can dissolve opensolaris at any time. Move on. If one of Sun's lawyers wants to pick a fight on that issue, then I will either set them straight or allow the community to be flushed. Either way, we don't need a Devil's advocate, at least not until the Devil earns his way as a core contributor. We have enough barriers already without inventing ones that don't yet exist. ....Roy
