Hi Rob
Rob Unsworth schrieb:
Hi,
With the Community Council wanting funds raised by the sale of Authors
Documentation donated to Team OpenOffice.org e.V
Are you serious? Unfortunately I missed this information (probably
because I'm quite new to this list).
I decided to check it out. The only link I could find on the OOo site is here under
miscellaneous .
http://tools.openoffice.org/dev_docs/howtocontribute.html
and it is broken.
I located Team OOo here <http://www.teamopenoffice.de> My reaction when
the site came up was "You have got to be kidding".
Thank you for your politeness ;) - I'm going to forward your mail to the
german dev-list to see what comments we get there. I'm almost sure that
everybody else is feeling exactly like you decribed, and I'd really like
to know how this link made it on to the official website.
The only additional
information not visible is an application for membership, in German and a
three page "Statute" also in German. Even if I could read the "Statute" it
would not change my view, it would take a lot more than three pages.
I could provide a translation in case your are interested - there's
nothing surprising though but standard wordings.
What the 'friendly association'(self description)states to their purpose
in brief:
[...]
§2.1. promotion of project OpenOffice.org + spreading the software.
2.2.especially
2.2.1. ideational support of public and private organisations concerning
questions to the project.
2.2.2. support of volunteers, who are contributing to OOorg and therein
put the targets of Team OOorg into effect, by scholarship. [...]
2.2.3. information and education of the public in the potential and
range of use of OOorg for education.
2.2.4. developing and spreading the software for the public.
2.2.5. support of the work of the OOorg community council
2.3. Team OOo follows exclusively non profit purposes [...], is
altruistic and does not pursue goals primarily serving its own economic
interest. (hope, I got that right...)
2.4. Funds of Team OOo have to be used according to these paragraphs.
Members do not get benefits out of the associations funds. No person may
benefit from disproportional commissions made on expenses which are not
due to the purpose of Team OOo. This is regarding especially full time
members, who may earn an appropriate compensation for their work.
§3 membership...
[...]
(I cut my comments out)
Having more than 20 years administrative experience with a non profit
organisation raising and distributing public funds, I would not donate nor
recommend anyone donate to Team OOo e.V.
I understand the purpose of all these friendly associations in raising
funds rather than donating to them. Did I misunderstand something?
Me too have a couple of years of experience in a non profit org.
An organisation dealing in public donations must operate transparently. My
impression is that Team OO.o e.V are deliberately not transparent.
This is very polite again... not mentioning a website from 2003, which
is embarrassingly poor and provides a single link to the (english)
contribution page on OO.org which turns away at least 90% of german
surfers (in case they made it so far...) together with no content.
Putting aside my disgust. I wonder how many potential contributors checked
out Team OO.o e.V as I did and just walked away.
all?
kind regards - erich
--
erich christian, vienna, austria __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
