Re: [gentoo-dev] manifest-hashes changing to 'BLAKE2B SHA512' on 2017-11-21

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 3:21 PM, William L. Thomson Jr.
<wlt-ml@××××××.com> wrote:
>
> The council has no power
> over Trustees, and Trustees do have legal power over all of Gentoo.

Sure, just keep in mind that legally Gentoo is basically nothing but a
name and a logo.

The Trustees could ask the community to stop using the name and logo,
but in practice that would be about all they could do, in a
hypothetical world where the Trustees and the Community were in some
kind of conflict (which is unlikely in practice).

The actual distro is largely community-run.

Gentoo isn't like Redhat.  It isn't a legal entity that happens to
have a community.  It is more of a community that happens to have a
legal entity.  Since the Foundation doesn't actually have any
employees it is actually fairly limited in its ability to make things
happen in the real world.  With its funding it is actually fairly
limited in making things happen legally as well.  Its main function at
this time (IMO) is to protect the name so that somebody else who has
more money doesn't tell us to stop using it, and to pay for moderate
expenses.

> Which is some what strange as Trustees can be responsible for the actions of others. Despite having no say in such matters till it becomes a legal issue.

As long as the Trustees aren't violating any laws or blatantly
ignoring their violation I doubt they'd have much personal liability
to outsiders.  The Foundation has more liability, but really the main
risk there is losing whatever donations are sitting around unspent and
maybe having somebody tell us we can't call ourselves Gentoo.  The
practical independence of the community from the Foundation works both
ways.  Having to change our name would be inconvenient, but it is
still an unlikely outcome as we do try to be reasonably careful.

-- 
Rich