Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo Council vs Umbrella Corp ?

[Wols Lists]

On 29/08/20 20:47, William Hubbs wrote:
>> > Sound to me like you are an excellent candidate to join the Gentoo
>> > Council?  If so, contact Mgorny for pointers.

> The functions being discussed in this thread belong to the
> trustees (the board of directors for the foundation) [1]. Thhey are
> definitely not part of the council's skill set [2].
>
> mgorny and others are advocating disbanding the Gentoo foundation
> and transfering all of Gentoo's assets to an organization such as the Software
> Freedom Conservancy [3] and allowing the council to exist as it currently does.
>
> As a member of the council, I'll be the first to say I don't know
> anything about trustee functions. For me, the question is, do we want to
> control our own destiny as an organization or do we want to have another
> organization control it in some way? To be honest, I do not have that
> answer because I don't know how much control an umbrella organization
> would try to exert, and since they would control our purse strings, I
> don't know what the scope of control they would be able to exert is.

Sounds to me, actually from many of the other posts in this list, that
too many people don't understand the difference between a person, their
role, and a post.

(To give my favourite example, capitalism - at least the American form -
tends to emphasise "profit for the shareholders". But many shareholders
are either employees or pension fund members, who are severely damaged
by this "search for profit". Actions taken to "protect the shareholder"
often *damage* the owner of the shares!)

Speaking from an English view of things here ...

The over-arching legal authority here is presumably the Gentoo
Constitution. This gives power to the trustees, but also limits their
power. The trustees have no power to alter the constitution - that's
down to the people who created it - us the wider gentoo community I
suppose ...

The trustees then *delegate* the daily management to the foundation, who
*manage* the assets on behalf of the trustees and the constitution. The
foundation is enTRUSTed with the assets of the constitution, to manage
it in accord with the constitution. Any breach of that is a breach of
TRUST, which is pretty serious legally.

Should we as the constitution/trustees take our assets away from the
foundation and give them to the SFC to manage, that now puts the SFC in
place of the foundation, with the SAME trust and legal issues. They
*must* keep our assets separate from everyone else's (including their
own) and *must* return said assets should they cease operating.

So, legally, whether it's the foundation, or the SFC, there shouldn't be
any noticeable change. But it should result in a lot of cost saving, as
the SFC's accountants will have more experience and be more efficient,
and by sharing we reduce costs. The SFC could buy a mainframe (to which
we chip in) to centralise hardware. Etc etc. But legally, WE OPT IN.
They can't take our money and do it without asking.

The big fly in the ointment I see here is the US's casual attitude to
enforcing all this (and I've heard some horror stories from Canada too
:-( I'm also involved in something exactly similar in the UK, and a lot
of people are worried ...

So from a legal point of view what's the problem? From an enforcement
point of view if things go wrong, well yes I know there's a problem!

Cheers,
Wol