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On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 6:50 PM Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote: |
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> |
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> I'm more open to this idea than I was in the past but I continue to have concerns about recruiting board members who will execute the duties required. |
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What duties are these? As far as I'm aware you don't need the members |
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of the board to do much in order to be a non-profit, including a |
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501c3. |
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There are certainly requirements for the Foundation as a whole, but I |
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don't believe there are many legal requirements for the board itself. |
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They could be addressed by bringing in expertise in non-board roles. |
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> - We could recruit outside members of the board who are not Gentoo Developers, but had advocacy from other OSS projects. |
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IMO this is a really bad idea. This basically hands legal control |
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over Gentoo to outsiders (at least in part). If we need their |
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expertise, why not have them do the work, but not place them on the |
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board? They could be made officers if necessary, since officers |
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legally don't have the final say over decisions. |
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IMO it would be better still to just hire them as employees and not |
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even make them officers. An officer merely needs to certify that |
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certain things were done correctly to the state - the officer doesn't |
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need to do them personally. |
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> - We could try to recruit or modify the way individuals are recruiter as Gentoo Developers, to make it easier to attract board members. |
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> |
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> I'd like to also discuss whatever foundational changes we might make in a new set of bylaws besides simply board membership. |
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I feel like we're having the tail wag the dog here. We're talking |
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about basically diluting the control of everybody who is recognized as |
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a contributor to bring in more outside people, in the hope that these |
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outsiders will file some paperwork. |
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If all you care about is paperwork just dissolve the Foundation |
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entirely, because in the US we have thousands of corporations that all |
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file their paperwork on time. Lots of paperwork will still get done |
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without Gentoo. Plenty of it will be done by FOSS-oriented |
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non-profits too. |
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Gentoo doesn't exist to get paperwork done. The Foundation and the |
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necessary paperwork exist to facilitate the operation of the distro. |
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Right now everybody the community recognizes as a significant |
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contributor automatically is eligible for membership in the |
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Foundation. If we're not recognizing significant contributors with |
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the "Developer" label then this should of course be fixed. However, |
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if somebody isn't contributing enough to be recognized as a regular |
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contributor then why would we want them to have a say in how the |
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distro is run? |
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And keep in mind that a Foundation that gets divorced from the distro |
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can cause a lot of headaches. At the very least they have the power |
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to force a name change, new infra, and so on. It isn't the end of the |
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world, and I'm not saying that anybody involved in the Foundation |
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wants this. I'm just saying that we need to be careful about handing |
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control over to outsiders. |
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Also, if an "outsider" is really that interested in volunteering to |
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help Gentoo they really aren't an outsider anyway, and if they're |
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seriously contributing they can be designated as a developer, as the |
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ebuild quiz is not required to become a Developer. Just let |
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themselves immerse themselves in the community first before putting |
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them in charge. |
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-- |
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Rich |
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