I'm happy to be able to announce that the QEMU project has joined Software Freedom Conservancy. This is something we've been wanting to do for a while now (we've talked about it at several previous QEMU Summit meetings).
Software Freedom Conservancy is a non-profit public charity that provides financial and admin services to the various Free Software and Open Source projects under its umbrella. Conservancy membership gives us a structure and access to various services: https://sfconservancy.org/members/services/ of which perhaps the most significant is having an organization that can accept donations (such as the payments to mentoring organizations in the Google Summer of Code). Conservancy will also be able to hold project assets like the qemu-project.org domain name for us. As part of this, we've slightly formalized QEMU's leadership structure, because Conservancy need to know who's allowed to ask them to do something on behalf of the project. So we've created the QEMU Leadership Committee, whose initial members are Paolo Bonzini, Andreas Färber, Alexander Graf, Stefan Hajnoczi, Mike Roth and myself. Committee voting is by simple majority on all decisions (including on who to add to or remove from the Committee). There can't be more than two members employed by the same company on the committee at once. This doesn't mean any change in the general day-to-day working of the project. I don't expect that we'll need to take formal decisions on behalf of the project very often, but now we have a mechanism for it. People who like press releases can find the official one from Conservancy here: http://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/jul/23/qemu-joins/ I'd like to thank Stefan Hajnoczi in particular for doing most of the legwork in getting this set up, and also the folks at Conservancy. -- PMM