Eric Kow writes: > > - What is the process for "graceful" handover to new representatives? > > Example: Eric loses interest in Darcs and doesn't want to work on it > > anymore. > > I think it would be fairly easy to contact the Conservancy and let them > know we have a new representative
It's easy if you or David does it. But people do drop out of sight or refuse to communicate for various reasons (it's happened twice in the XEmacs Project to my knowledge, both times with people I respect a lot but who had brief periods of insanity), and in those cases it can be difficult to get things changed. Ask the Conservacy people; they'll probably be able to help, give you an idea of how other projects manage that aspect of the relationship. While Karen says that no project has left the Conservacy yet, IIRC Brad Kuhn is a battle- scarred veteran of the FSF going back to the Lucid Emacs fiasco. I'm sure they have ideas, and Karen has been very forthcoming about how some of the terms may not be to projects' liking, but they are necessary either to protect the "charitable" status or other projects in the Conservacy. Note that if you go to the extent of setting up a "Darcs social contract" or suchlike, for it to have legal standing it will need to be added to your contract with the Conservacy. Ask them how they would want to manage that; I don't think it's a problem, though. > > - What is the process for overthrowing representatives? Example: Eric > > goes insane and decides that Darcs should be rewritten in Emacs Lisp, > > but everybody else in the community disagrees. (This process might > > just be "well, fork it".) > > It's worth giving thought to this. Although for purposes of signing the > agreement, I think the answer could be "well, fork it" for the > moment. That's right. Depending on how the project evolves and its success in attracting donations, substantial resources (N*$1,000) could be involved. See http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2008/03/id_love_to_quit_my_job_sort_of.html http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/2c4ddb9e851d6cb5 as evidence that that order of magnitude is not impossible to achieve. However, that will take some time to evolve. Not to mention copyrights ("priceless", as the MasterCard commercial says) if the project decides to go the assignment route. > There would also be other issues to deal with, e.g. what do we do with > darcs.net? It doesn't appear that we need to settle this right away, > and I think that should we stray into overthrow territory, we could > re-open the discussion then. Shall we leave it at that? No, a couple of things need to be checked. The process itself can wait, but the implications for the relationship to SFC can't because these issues are related to other issues of project termination. The SFC agreement says, as I understand it, that "all assets" "of the project" are SFC's. This is problematic with respect to things like *domain names* and *copyrights* that clearly "belong" to the project but are *owned* by individuals. You should get SFC's *intent* with respect to those things down on paper (that won't necessarily govern in court, but it will surely help), and possibly get your own lawyer to look for pitfalls (which even a well-intentioned contract can contain). My guess is that SFC's intent is something like "funds contributed to Darcs, assets like domain names purchased with those funds, and copyrights assigned to the project will remain with the SFC in the event that no appropriately qualified successor to the SFC can be found; where use of such an asset is donated to the project by an individual, the asset itself remains the property of the individual." However, I can imagine other viewpoints. Eg, this interpretation would allow the top contributors, ie owning say 95% of the copyright, to secede from the project and take future versions of Darcs proprietary, which is precisely what the successor conditions are attempting to prevent. If there are very few accounting for that percentage, it would be practically possible for them to do it (they'd have to replace the 5% they don't own, but that's doable especially if you expect to be paid well for doing it!) The FSF tries strenuously to get assignments to avoid that kind of thing. The SFC doesn't seem to be stressing the "future of Darcs" aspect, but rather helping to manage financial support of Darcs and preventing assets acquired as charitable contributions from being hijacked for private profit. IANAL and I do not have any special knowledge of the SFC; I just put forward the above "interpretations of intent" to give you an idea of the issues I'm thinking about, not because they are likely to be accurate. Steve _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
