On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 09:30 -0700, Zach Welch wrote: [snip] > To reiterate, I am now no longer willing to accept offers to do the work > that I actually need to survive, to demonstrate that my motives here > have no profit in them anymore. All previous offers for me to do paid > work are now off the table, until all hostilities from the community > have been ameliorated. I hope this action helps resolve some tensions.
Okay, with Dominic's encouragement, let me strike the above and replace it with something of much clearer intent -- and beneficial to the entire OpenOCD and free software communities. Happily, this also saves me from shooting my career in the foot. """ I hereby commit myself to donating all profits recovered in the pursuit of OpenOCD GPL violations on my behalf to a non-profit. I would prefer that the community create The OpenOCD Foundation to receive such funds and manage them along with the copyrights and trademarks on behalf the open source and free software communities. Should forming this type of organization haven proven intractable, I want any recovered monies to fund the Free Software Foundation instead. """ I have prepared a proposal to create The OpenOCD Foundation, which I can post in a new thread. It has been sitting in my Drafts box for weeks, prepared to be pitched to the community if the need arose. I would like to introduce it fully in the next day or two, after adjusting it to account for recent events, discussions, and pending community feedback. The arguments for such formal organization are indicated above: violation money comes from copyright violations, which can only be enforced by copyright holders. We have now seen this can turn into a real nightmare when it comes to taking action, simply by discussing a possible exception to the license. Can you imagine what would happen if anyone of us tried to sue each others customers for violations; even if those suits turned out to be frivolous, it would be a PITA to sort out for the community. Traumatic would not even begin to describe it. Without such a formal organization, I fear that too many stakeholders will be involved for the community to take decisive actions when they are required to defend the project's IP. From what I understand, a lack of rights-holder unity may hinder or derail some types of enforcement efforts in the future. Collective IP is an area where things become less clear to me. I know how to exercise my own rights as an individual far better than those of a project as a whole. Anyone else have insight? In any event, a foundation _is_ an individual, legally speaking, which is why the _legal_ issues are so much easier. Decisions... well, those will still be hard and should be community driven. With a non-profit means of contributing support (i.e. tax-deductable), the community could use money to buy new targets for developers -- and much more. I have laid out the benefits in fairly comprehensive vision based on my past experience in the area of non-profit entities, but my ideas need the community's input and support to succeed. Without biasing the community further than this, what would you expect from such an entity? As a user? Developer? Contributor? Vendor? Founder? Please provide feedback to this thread. Cheers, Zach _______________________________________________ Openocd-development mailing list Openocd-development@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openocd-development
