Re: [gentoo-project] Groups under the Council or Foundation: the structure & processes thereof

[Raymond Jennings]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 2:46 PM, Luca Barbato <lu_zero@g.o> wrote:

> On 13/11/2016 23:33, Raymond Jennings wrote:
> > My personal opinion here is that *anything* to do with legal issues,
> > such as legal liability, no matter how theoretical, is something the
> > trustees should be involved in.
>
> I already enumerated the situations that would involve the foundation.
>
> On the contrary of companies that can be sued if somebody hired by them
> harasses or worse another person within the company, the foundation,
> being unrelated to the Gentoo community barring acting as a piggy bank,
> cannot be sued.
>
> There isn't any specific requirement for that and there isn't any
> contract that ties the people volunteering their free time to do
> something in Gentoo with the foundation (since the copyright assignment
> got killed as I mentioned before).
>

Ebuild headers would appear to say differently.  If the status quo has
changed this needs to be reflected in ebuild maintenance guidelines if it
hasn't already.

> Per my own dev quiz, the foundation's job is to worry about legal
> > issues (lawsuits, copyrights, etc) and financial issues (donations,
> > server hardware) so that the codemonkey developers don't have to.
>
> Even copyright is a gray area thanks to the fact a large deal of
> developers lives in Europe.
>
> > That is why I CCed the trustees when the logo stuff on third party
> > sites came up.  I don't think there's any conspiracy to keep the
> > trustees in the dark, but I *do* perceive a lack of communication.
>
> The fact trustees have no mean to peek in / influence Council or Comrel
> shields the foundation from lawsuits.
>

A sort of "using plausible deniability" as a defense?

>
> lu
>
>