On 06.01.2015 08:33, Luke Shumaker wrote: > At Sun, 04 Jan 2015 17:44:17 -0300, > hellekin wrote: >> In the last weeks we exchanged a lot about the need and possibility to >> introduce money in the development of Parabola/GNU/Linux-libre. >> >> Tiberiu offered to sponsor the project from the Fundația Ceata, which >> presents a number of advantages, especially on of ethical alignment. > > Tiberiu has been very generous, and Ceata seems to be a good match. > However, I don't think that we've given the SFC or SPI proper > consideration, and I think that it would be a mistake to simply go for > the first foundation that reaches out to us.
FWIW, I have offered you consulting and reassured you of Ceata's support for Parabola. It's your decision, but I tried to inform you the best I could and not interfere with your process of decision-making, so that you know your options and choose the organization which is best for Parabola. > The way I'm looking at it, there are several services that joining a > foundation would be able to offer that would be valuable to us. > - Handling donations > - Making donations tax-deductible > - Copyright(left) enforcement (should we ever find a GPL violation) > - Liability protection (should we ever find ourselves on the wrong > side of the court room). > I know that the SFC offers all of these. With a 10% commission of your donations (besides bank commissions) and without any volunteer contribution to the project. http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/ (last heading, "How much does it cost us financially to join Conservancy?") Ceata is asking for 0% (zero) commission and incoming transfers in RON, EUR and USD have 0% (zero) commission from our bank (special offer for Romanian nonprofits). Ceata had Sorin-Mihai Vârgolici (smv) involved in Parabola and probably more will follow if we become your sponsor. I stated this already. And they will not have a vote, so we don't end up in a conflict of interest during our contract of collaboration. https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2014-December/002619.html > I don't know much about > Ceata, and I suffer from stupid-American syndrome where I can only > learn one spoken language. This year we will have a bilingual website (Romanian and English) and more documentation of our activities. > Honestly, I think #3 would be the most valuable. I'm not sure that > it's terribly likely that there will ever be a GPL violation on any > Parabola code. But I know that if there were, we would be *totally* > incapable of enforcing the GPL[^0]. The discussion was about donations, not about copyright. That's why I didn't bring it up, because you didn't bring it up and didn't want to make Parabola hackers feel threatened by a sponsor like Ceata ("they ask for our copyright!"). If you want to assign Ceata copyright (and since we are here, maybe you want the trademark rights too, so you are protected), we can represent Parabola in court as a victim. Ceata has offered legal advice for a number of projects, including international ones like Free Technology Academy on copyleft violation. http://freeknowledge.eu/FTA_Community_demands_TradePub_to_correct_inappropriate_use_of_course_books We once dealt with one copyleft violation for one our software projects, but we discussed and reached a solution outside of the court. Courts are expensive and for suing someone (for copyleft violation) you need funds. Less funds because it's less expensive in Romania than in USA, true. SFC asks for donations to go in court against a GPL violation, they don't dry out their accounts to sue someone without a proper fundraising campaign. Ceata has the legal experts to go in court, but we certainly can't promise that we will spend our foundation funds to got in court for Parabola (or any other project, internal or external) without a proper fundraising campaign for that particular (so important) case. If Parabola finds itself in this case, it's the project who has the main responsibility in raising the funds, not Ceata's. Ceata offers the accounts for raising funds for the court room, does some promotion and repesents Parabola in the court room. That's it. However, please allow me to be skeptical about copyleft violations of a completely free distribution of GNU/Linux, which contribution to the distribution (Arch) is based on is to blacklist nonfree software in that distribution. Why not make Arch more proprietary instead of working on Parabola to maltreat users? Innovation in Parabola which is not related to blacklisting I assume goes upstream (in Arch or for specific software, in that software project). Unless your scripts are not specific and are very abstract, looking for certain licenses, some malintentioned third party could use your scripts to change them so instead (let's say) of blacklisting nonfree licenses, they can blacklist copyleft licenses (*GPL and others), so they are sure all it's left is software under lax (permissive) free licenses or proprietary licenses that bundled together they can distribute it as a nonfree system. But it's impossible with a GNU/Linux distribution to delete all copyleft software and still have a functional system in the end. With GNU/kBSD maybe yes, but then why not start from a *BSD with less copyleft software (only GDB and other few important/popular GNU/GPL software not rewritten (yet) under a lax free license). And if they choose to start from a *BSD, they can't use your scripts anyway, because the package management is different in *BSD distributions. But the truth is I have never heard of a GPL violation suit of an entire distribution, but instead on a particular GPL software included in the distribution which was modified without providing free license and sources for the modified version distributed as binary. So if libretools (I've just noticed Luke's announcement) is a software that could be useful to third parties in the proprietary world, by all means, the author should assign the copyright to whatever organization trusts more for the legal and maybe the fundraising support, too. > With that in mind, them handling money for us seems like a small added > bonus, IMO. That's most of the work. Check SFC website for how many lawsuits they handled. I could find only one case, for a very popular and repeatedly violated by many parties of GPL software, BusyBox in routers (and embedded devices in general, I assume). https://sfconservancy.org/news/2010/aug/03/busybox-gpl/ Ceata covered the topic too: http://fii-liber.ro/se-iau-masuri-pentru-apararea-libertatii-utilizatorilor-de-linux Since then, several popular free software projects like Samba and Wine have agreed to let SFC to handle compliance issues, but lawsuits for these projects' copyleft violations were never started (and if off-the-court solutions can be reached, that's perfect!) https://sfconservancy.org/news/2012/may/29/compliance/ Anyway, SFC is in two camps, free software *and* open source and sponsors project which distribute proprietary parts/components/packages. SPI too. I would think Parabola would join an equally ethical organization, like Ceata. https://sfconservancy.org/news/2008/dec/04/foresight-distro-of-year/ https://sfconservancy.org/news/2008/jul/24/foresight-linux/ And SPI never handled a lawsuit and don't promise to: http://spi-inc.org/projects/services/ They offer legal council, of course (it's needed at least for contracts). Ceata is no different in the regard of legal council. The only difference between Ceata and SFC is that SFC have been in court for *one* member project. > I'm OK with receiving donations that cover expenses. These are the most efficient way to spend money, because you don't need to pay any state taxes when paying bills (except for the VAT, but that's true for an individual too). For a copyright contract, Romania asks for a tax of 16%, which is small really and fixed (doesn't matter the value of the contract). > I think I'd even > be OK with using donations to employ one of us full-time (though I'm > skeptical that we would raise even close to enough money to do that). For an employment contract in Romania, the taxes rise to 40% of the gross salary (which is roughly like everywhere else). It's fixed, it doesn't matter what is its value. The lower bound of how big can be a salary is just under 200 EUR, though -- this gives you more flexibility. The lower bound for copyright compensation per hour is smaller than in the Western more developed countries, too. We have to check how much it is, if you are interested now. > And with money, we have to have some sort of formal administration. > Someone would have to be a "representative" with Ceata or the SFC or > whatever and decide where money goes. Do we democratize all of those > communications like we do everything else? Do we elect a > representative (republicanize) for efficiency? As much as a I love > our wholly democratic structure, it has severe inefficiencies. For a > year and a half (since July 2013) I've been trying to ratify a couple > of wording changes to our social contract. I mean, whatever. But > that's not really going to fly once a foundation with money is > involved. You don't only need a representative and leave her/him to take decisions on behalf of the project after formal consultations. You need to organize voting sessions and trust not the consensus, but the majority. Consensus, as weird it may sound, can kill democracy and projects. A project member should be able to say I vote against, because I have my doubts regarding this, but I am with the project, whatever the majority decides after all the information provided in the discussion on that matter. > I don't recall if it was Tiberiu wrote, or something from the SFC (I > can't find it now (strong beverage, remember :P), but I distinctly > remember the mention that with the bureaucratic duties of being such a > representative, one might have less time for technical contributions. That's correct, I did when I presented you your options for receiving donations: https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2014-December/002617.html Thanks, -- Tiberiu C. Turbureanu Președinte, Fundația Ceata http://turbureanu.ro/contact Susții libertatea artelor și tehnologiilor? Înscrie-te ca membru: http://ceata.org/%C3%AEnscrieri _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.parabola.nu/mailman/listinfo/dev
