Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Alec Warner <antarus@g.o>
To: gentoo-project <gentoo-project@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] Groups under the Council or Foundation: the structure & processes thereof
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:15:39
Message-Id: CAAr7Pr9n8FjC7_2qN03FDqZTCSRN_FVrcefb9dWxBpO+DBap-A@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-project] Groups under the Council or Foundation: the structure & processes thereof by Alec Warner
1 s/council/counsel/g. Spelling is hard.
2
3 -A
4
5 On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 4:15 PM, Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote:
6
7 >
8 >
9 > On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 2:46 PM, Luca Barbato <lu_zero@g.o> wrote:
10 >
11 >> On 13/11/2016 23:33, Raymond Jennings wrote:
12 >> > My personal opinion here is that *anything* to do with legal issues,
13 >> > such as legal liability, no matter how theoretical, is something the
14 >> > trustees should be involved in.
15 >>
16 >> I already enumerated the situations that would involve the foundation.
17 >>
18 >> On the contrary of companies that can be sued if somebody hired by them
19 >> harasses or worse another person within the company, the foundation,
20 >> being unrelated to the Gentoo community barring acting as a piggy bank,
21 >> cannot be sued.
22 >>
23 >> There isn't any specific requirement for that and there isn't any
24 >> contract that ties the people volunteering their free time to do
25 >> something in Gentoo with the foundation (since the copyright assignment
26 >> got killed as I mentioned before).
27 >>
28 >
29 > I think I disagree with you here. However, I suspect the risk is minimal
30 > and can be mitigated by carrying the appropriate insurance. For instance,
31 > if we look at say, Debian.
32 >
33 > 1) SPI contains the funds for Debian.
34 > 2) SPI contains the copyright and trademarks for Debian.
35 > 3) Does SPI control the policies of Debian in the same way?
36 > 4) What insurance (if any) does SPI carry to mitigate this risk (or
37 > perhaps their lawyers claim there are none.)
38 >
39 > I'm not aware of trustees seeking legal council on this issue, so I want
40 > to avoid making metastructure proposals based on laymen risk assessment. I
41 > think if the trustees are worried about risk, they can hire an attorney to
42 > evaluate such risk. If the risk is great, at least we have some kind of
43 > legal argument (e.g. we pursue the meta-structure changes on the advice of
44 > legal council.) So that is how I plan on moving forward.
45 >
46 >>
47 >> > Per my own dev quiz, the foundation's job is to worry about legal
48 >> > issues (lawsuits, copyrights, etc) and financial issues (donations,
49 >> > server hardware) so that the codemonkey developers don't have to.
50 >>
51 >> Even copyright is a gray area thanks to the fact a large deal of
52 >> developers lives in Europe.
53 >>
54 >> > That is why I CCed the trustees when the logo stuff on third party
55 >> > sites came up. I don't think there's any conspiracy to keep the
56 >> > trustees in the dark, but I *do* perceive a lack of communication.
57 >>
58 >> The fact trustees have no mean to peek in / influence Council or Comrel
59 >> shields the foundation from lawsuits.
60 >>
61 >
62 >> lu
63 >>
64 >>
65 >