Hi all In April we started the process of becoming an Associated Project at the Software in the Public Interest umbrella foundation (spi-inc.org). Josh Berkus has kindly helped us formulate especially the part with a Drizzle SPI Council. Since you weren't keen on introducing any kind of elections, I think this kind of mostly passive body that still is more than just one person is a great way to formulate our relationship with the SPI.
We are now ready to formally ask an SPI director to sponsor us through the review and acceptance process. Before going there, this seems to be a good point in time to let the Drizzle community review what our input is (as we have no other decision making organ than this mailing list). *Brian A and Mike S*: Could you specifically ok the draft agreement texts at the end, that have your name on them. The assumption is that the SPI will ask lawyers to review (meaning: rewrite) them, but it seems the best approach is that we propose some text up front, so please ok these at this point. henrik ************************************** [Placeholder for greeting and other polite introduction stuff] 1. The name of your project, and some details about it if we wouldn't have heard of it before. Drizzle (http://drizzle.org/) Drizzle is one of the forks of MySQL, in fact the earliest of the currently major ones. Unlike the other forks it diverges from the parent MySQL code base, having completely replaced or re-factored many areas of the code base. Drizzle was started by Brian Aker after Sun acquired MySQL AB. It was sponsored by Sun employing a team several engineers and a manager. After Oracle acquisition a large part of the team was employed by Rackspace, who sponsored Drizzle until the first stable release. There are about 20-30 people committing to Drizzle each month. Today the core team is employed by various different companies. With the stable release out the interest in Drizzle is rising and also vendors have started offering support for it. This is therefore a good point in time to solidify and clarify the legal status of being a non-profit community project. Drizzle has always been a community project and was never "owned" by Sun or Rackspace, in any meaning of the word. It is mostly GPLv2 licensed (inherited from MySQL) with client libraries licensed as BSD. You can find more information, such as the charter and scope on www.drizzle.org. 2. Which SPI services you will need. Currently some IPR assets that in some sense make up "the Drizzle project" are held by various individuals. We'd like these assets to be transferred/donated to the SPI, so that it is clear that Drizzle is a community project legally anchored into a US non-profit foundation. The assets to be transferred are: * Brian Aker asserts that he is the owner of the Drizzle(TM) trademark, and transfer it to SPI. * Michael Shadle is the owner of the drizzle.org internet domain name and will transfer the ownership of that to SPI * Brian Aker, on behalf of the drizzle-developers Launchpad team, transfers the Launchpad projects "drizzle" and "drizzle-umbrella" and the Launchpad hosted mailing lists: drizzle-discuss, drizzle-benchmark, drizzle-builds, drizzle-advocacy and drizzle-operations to SPI. We are aware that the first and third point are rather abstract acts, but feel that explicitly pooling Drizzle related artifacts into the hands of SPI has some value. For points two and three, the people now administering these online properties would of course continue to do so. We'd like to know if we need to make changes to our DNS registration that somehow reflects the SPI ownership, or if we can just continue with the current registration unchanged. At the end of this email I have drafted some simple agreements that could be used as the basis for executing these transfers (Appendix A). We are also interested in using SPI to receive and spend donations for Drizzle, as well as the related accounting and banking services. There hasn't yet been a need for such, but as the community grows and diversifies having a properly accounted Drizzle fund will surely be useful. Finally, Drizzle occasionally gets non-monetary contributions from companies, such as virtual servers. If it is possible for those companies to get a tax benefit by way of donating these resources via the SPI, that would of course be great. (We would like to know more about if there is a lot of overhead in valuating these contributions.) 3. Who is going to be your liaison to SPI, and what your process for selecting/electing liaisons is. We propose the following text: **************************************************************************************** The following five Drizzle contributors will be named as the SPI Council for Drizzle: Brian Aker Lee Bieber Stewart Smith Monty Taylor Henrik Ingo This group will appoint a Liaison by simple majority vote, and may replace the Liaison at any time. Henrik Ingo will be the first Liaison. The Council may fill vacancies by majority vote of the remaining Council members on resignation or absence of any Council member. **************************************************************************************** Appendix A: Draft agreement texts for transfer of Drizzle assets **************************************************************************************** Transfer of trademark and transfer of Launchpad online properties As "DRIZZLE" is the name of an open source software project started by me, Brian Aker, and other people in 2008, and As "DRIZZLE" is the trademark under which the software is released and distributed, as well as the name which we refer to the project itself, Being the owner of the DRIZZLE(TM) trademark I hereby donate it to Software in the Public Interest Inc, a Not-for-profit corporation in the state of New York, to hold on behalf of Drizzle, an SPI Associated Project. Further, As the Drizzle project uses the services of Launchpad.net for its daily operation, I hereby on behalf of the drizzle-developers Launchpad team, donate the following online Launchpad properties to Software in the Public Interest Inc, to hold on behalf of Drizzle, an SPI Associated Project: * The projects "drizzle" and "drizzle-umbrella" * Launchpad hosted mailing lists: drizzle-discuss, drizzle-benchmark, drizzle-builds, drizzle-advocacy and drizzle-operations. For clarity, these donations are conditional upon Drizzle first having been accepted by the SPI as an Associated Project, and the SPI having agreed to receive donations on behalf of the Drizzle project. Brian Aker **************************************************************************************** **************************************************************************************** Transfer of drizzle.org internet domain name Being the current owner of the drizzle.org domain name, I, Michael Shadle, hereby donate it to Software in the Public Interest Inc, a Not-for-profit corporation in the state of New York, to hold on behalf of Drizzle, an SPI Associated Project. For clarity, this donation is conditional upon Drizzle first having been accepted by the SPI as an Associated Project, and the SPI having agreed to receive donations on behalf of the Drizzle project. Michael Shadle **************************************************************************************** -- [email protected] +358-40-8211286 skype: henrik.ingo irc: hingo www.openlife.cc My LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=9522559 _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
