Dear chicken fans, as part of my homework I have asked Eric Kow, member of the darcs project for his advice and experience with the Software Freedom Conservancy. Please find his excellent answers below. Thanks Eric!
----- Forwarded message from Eric Kow <[email protected]> ----- Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:52:58 +0100 From: Eric Kow <[email protected]> To: Christian Kellermann <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Your experiences with the software freedom conservancy In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> Feel free to bounce/forward this as you see fit. For what it's worth, I'm very happy we joined the SFC. I think it's made our lives easier (we can own darcs hardware, for example) and has lent us a certain feeling of stability. Three general comments: [A] Keep in mind that while the SFC do have a lawyer working for them (Karen Sandler), they do *not* provide legal advice to projects outside the scope of SFC services (so things like signing the original agreement and [optionally!] copyright transfer forms. You'll want to talk to the sister SFLC organisation for that. I'm not really sure how one goes about retaining the services of the SFLC. They seem to provide at least a lot of documentation that you can read yourself. But Bradley and Karen work for both, I think, so perhaps they can advise on this. So why join the SFC? Basically because it's really useful to be (part of) a legal entity/person. It makes it possible to have things like a bank account, or even a single entity if you want to have consolidated copyright statements like Copyright (C) 2010 Software Freedom Conservancy. [B] If you're not careful, people on your team are going to be confused and excited about A for the wrong reason. In the darcs team, I still regularly have to point out that no, we don't really have proper lawyers we can turn to for all our questions. [C] If you really want to do copyright consolidation, know that the SFC have an agreement that guarantees that they will never change the license to something non-free. It's a nice touch where communities are averse to copyright-transfer. If you're interested in this stuff, I'd suggest carefully reading http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#legal and keeping in mind that you may need to get a proper lawyer to advise you. On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 20:39:38 +0200, Christian Kellermann wrote: > As I know that darcs did join the software freedom conservancy I would > like to ask you about your experiences with it. What is the amount of > time that has to be spent on administrative tasks Joining the SFC has reduced our overall administrative burden rather than added to it. What admin tasks I've done as a result of the SFC have been to collect receipts from people for reimbursements (whereas before it was a lot more informal), but if you're sufficiently organised about it, this takes little time. The overall gain from having somebody take care of the accounting, holding a proper bank account is very nice. That said there is an initial cost of joining, which is having to reach an agreement within the community about how your project will run itself: who will represent Chicken Scheme to the SFC and how may change in the future. This is a sort of one-time investment, and it's a good thing for your community to be clear about anyway. Keep in mind that the SFC have a non-interference policy with your project politics. It's completely up to you how you run yourselves, but you'll want to get it in writing. > , did being a us based non profit foundation turn out to be a benefit > for fundraising in europe? No, not particularly. The occasional big US donor has expressed appreciation for it being a US non-profit, but this makes no difference for Europeans. > How did the developers feel about putting it all in the > hands of a US based entity since the majority of darcs' developers is > based in europe (I think this is still true.) We are still mostly in Europe: out of 10 developers on http://wiki.darcs.net/DarcsTeam, I think 1 is in the USA and 1 is in Australia. I don't think anybody minds per se, but some developers would prefer to see a UK/Europe based entity for the practical reason of being able to get a government boost for their donations. In the UK, we have something called GiftAid, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giftaid I would very much welcome some sort of European complement to the SFC (I think they are working on it and you should definitely ask). If you have any French developers, one thing you should try is to lobby the folks who made the CeCILL license <http://cecill.info/> to create such an SFC-like and an SFLC-like structure (perhaps cooperating with the SFC and SLFC to minimise effort). They, after all, care about free software and have the lawyers to back them up. > I do have lots of questions like this of course. Besides these > technical questions I am also concerned how this whole process can be > gone through in a way that encourages all people to participate. I don't have a good answer for this. Perhaps see what you make of our our threads on darcs-users - http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2008-November/015684.html - http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2008-November/016107.html The general approach is just to be very transparent and have an attitude of seeking feedback/criticism. You also need to be ready to provide a fair summary of the discussion from time to time to keep things from spiralling out of control. > Or to put it differently I do not want to leave out anyone or make > them feel this way. The chicken developer community is rather small, > spread all over the world (with a small German bias). > I would propose that if your time permits I would transfer this > discussion to our chicken-hackers or even chicken-users mailing list, > so that everyone can ask whatever is on their heart. Sure. Hope this helps, -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> For a faster response, try +44 (0)1273 64 2905 or xmpp:[email protected] (Jabber or Google Talk only) ----- End forwarded message ----- _______________________________________________ Chicken-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-hackers
