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List Archive: gentoo-nfp
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To: Alistair Bush <ali_bush@g.o>
From: Richard Freeman <rich0@g.o>
Subject: Re: Spending money authority
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:45:02 -0400

 1.1

Alistair Bush wrote:
> 
> And what happens if the Council actions funding that is against the 
> interests of Gentoo.  Is the Foundation to blindly accept there decision.
> 

Well, if the two bodies have the same constituency I can't see this 
being too likely to happen.

While the foundation can technically exercise a veto on the spending of 
money, and has other legal powers with regard to the trademark and use 
of property owned by the foundation, its ability to use this power is 
limited practically.

Imagine what would happen if the trustees decided they really didn't 
like the council's actions and decided to take any kind of serious 
action as a result.  I'm not talking about not paying $200 for a booth 
at a conference - I'm talking about calling up a hosting company and 
reassigning root access on an infrastructure box or something like that, 
so that policy can be changed and enforced.  That kind of action could 
potentially lead to a fork - particularly if a majority of devs oppose 
the action.  It would only work out ok if the devs managed to elect a 
bunch of dictators to the council and regretted their choices later (but 
somehow managed to not elect similarly-minded dictators to the trustees).

Again, as long as both bodies are elected by the same developers I don't 
think that it is likely that they'll ever be in this kind of opposition. 
  However, in practice neither body has that great a "veto" power over 
the other.  Legal ownership of property isn't a big trump card in an 
open-source linux distro.  It is nice to come up with theoretical 
scenarios where various groups can override each other, but we're 
talking about human beings here, and people don't just sit and watch 
while their democratically-elected leaders are dismantled (in either 
organization).  Both groups have the needs of Gentoo at heart, and as a 
result neither can afford to start a war with the other...

-- 
gentoo-nfp@g.o mailing list


Replies:
Re: Spending money authority
-- Colonel Panic
Re: Spending money authority
-- Alistair Bush
References:
Spending money authority
-- William L. Thomson Jr.
Re: Spending money authority
-- Alistair Bush
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Oct 02, 2008

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