I think we need to be clear what the purpose of the membership is, from the point of view of the organisation. From my point of view, that purpose is control and accountability. That is:
The membership should/will control SPI, and SPI's board and ultimately everyone that acts for SPI will be held accountable to the membership. So, given what SPI's purpose is (broadly speaking, to help the free software development community by doing certain things that require legal personality), we can see that that membership ought to be the people who are supposed to benefit from SPI's abilities as a legal entity: free software developers. I see a very real risk that if SPI ends up legally owning significant amounts of copyrights, patents, trademarks, money and other property, it could easily become an effective target for `hijacking' by sudden large numbers of new members, in order to wrest control of SPI's assets away from their intended purposes. This kind of thing is already happening regularly to eg Building Societies[1] in Britain. [1] A Building Society is a mutual society. It's a financial institution, a bit like a savings and loan. I don't think we can rely on SPI's charter and contracts/trusts with associated projects to protect us from this kind of thing. Instead, we need to make it difficult for `just anybody' to become a voting member. Therefore, I'm very strongly opposed to Nils's Scenario 1, with a completely flat and open membership. Instead, I believe that voting membership should be open to individuals who have contributed significantly to the free software community. This will, unfortunately, require some effort to administer, but the alternatives (dictat by the Board vs. the possibility of hijacking) are much worse. I don't particularly care whether there is an additional non-voting `associate membership' or some such. There seems little point though - what is the purpose of these associate members ? Just to make them feel good ? Ian.
