On Tuesday 12 April 2005 14:36, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > Good question.  I have to admit that I have no idea what the answer
> > might be.  I would think that the Foundation could, and probably should,
> > engage in legal contracts on the behalf of Gentoo devs.  The tricky part
> > is that I'm not sure what, if any, ability the Foundation has to ensure
> > that Gentoo devs live up to their part of the bargain.
>
> That's pretty much what I'm afraid of...
>
> I know that I would like to pursue some possible arrangements with other
> companies, especially as I am now getting quite close to producing some
> fun GameCD images, and quite a few of the "free" games from standard
> game production houses have restrictions on redistributing them in any
> form other than their original.

In principle such an agreement with e.g. ID software would mean that the 
foundation gets rights to create/distribute a cd under specific terms. One of 
those terms could be that the foundation delegates this allowed to delegate 
the actual creation to one of it's members. There is a big issue of liability 
however. The only solution I see is that there is some kind of "vault" that 
has restricted upload so that only foundation trustees can upload files there 
that would then be "distributed". Under such a system the foundation might be 
persuaded to accept liability, and could be protected against actions from 
it's members/developers.

This does indeed impose an extra limitation on the developers, but I think 
that developers should be able to overcome this as the alternative is not to 
do this at all.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net