Gentoo Archives: gentoo-nfp

From: Richard Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: Alistair Bush <ali_bush@g.o>
Cc: gentoo-nfp@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-nfp] Spending money authority
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:45:06
Message-Id: 484FACAE.4070404@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-nfp] Spending money authority by Alistair Bush
1 Alistair Bush wrote:
2 >
3 > And what happens if the Council actions funding that is against the
4 > interests of Gentoo. Is the Foundation to blindly accept there decision.
5 >
6
7 Well, if the two bodies have the same constituency I can't see this
8 being too likely to happen.
9
10 While the foundation can technically exercise a veto on the spending of
11 money, and has other legal powers with regard to the trademark and use
12 of property owned by the foundation, its ability to use this power is
13 limited practically.
14
15 Imagine what would happen if the trustees decided they really didn't
16 like the council's actions and decided to take any kind of serious
17 action as a result. I'm not talking about not paying $200 for a booth
18 at a conference - I'm talking about calling up a hosting company and
19 reassigning root access on an infrastructure box or something like that,
20 so that policy can be changed and enforced. That kind of action could
21 potentially lead to a fork - particularly if a majority of devs oppose
22 the action. It would only work out ok if the devs managed to elect a
23 bunch of dictators to the council and regretted their choices later (but
24 somehow managed to not elect similarly-minded dictators to the trustees).
25
26 Again, as long as both bodies are elected by the same developers I don't
27 think that it is likely that they'll ever be in this kind of opposition.
28 However, in practice neither body has that great a "veto" power over
29 the other. Legal ownership of property isn't a big trump card in an
30 open-source linux distro. It is nice to come up with theoretical
31 scenarios where various groups can override each other, but we're
32 talking about human beings here, and people don't just sit and watch
33 while their democratically-elected leaders are dismantled (in either
34 organization). Both groups have the needs of Gentoo at heart, and as a
35 result neither can afford to start a war with the other...
36
37 --
38 gentoo-nfp@l.g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-nfp] Spending money authority Alistair Bush <ali_bush@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-nfp] Spending money authority Colonel Panic <cp@××××××××××.cx>