On Sat, 29 Jan 2005, Grant Goodyear wrote: > Also, the decision on who should be a member of the Gentoo Foundation > is currently deliberately vague. The reason is that it needs some > discussion. The original intention of the Foundation was that the > Foundation should hold and protect Gentoo intellectual property, and > serve as an organization that can receive (and disburse) donations. > The Foundation is not at all involved in Gentoo (the operating system) > development. Development responsibilities lie with the various Gentoo > top-level project managers and their teams. The proposed bylaws simply > state that new members should be nominated by existing members. There > has been some thought that all Gentoo devs, or all Gentoo devs that have > been productive in Gentoo for longer than a certain period of time, > should be members. There has also been an argument made that having > 200+ members is going to make obtaining a quorum rather difficult, to > say the least. Moreover, would it ever make sense to have a member of > the Foundation who is not also a Gentoo developer?
Personally, I feel that a distinction between the two is good. First, I'm sure we all know programmers who are amazing with code, but have the political interest level of an asocial wombat. We certainly do not want to suggest that they be Foundation members, simply because they've been here a while. People should only be Foundation members if they have motivation to be such. Devs who would be much happier coding than attending Foundation meetings should be able to do just that. That being said, I do feel that most of the devs who've put in a lot of time into Gentoo should be able to be Foundation members if they want, with little or no obstacles. Finally, I definitely can see it making sense to have Foundation members who are not a dev. The class of individuals that comes most readily to mind, being a www.groklaw.org lurker, is lawyers - we probably want one or two in the Foundation, if there are some who are interested in being members. Of course, great care must be spent selecting any Foundation members who are not developers. It's fairly easy to tell that someone cares a lot about Gentoo when one sees them putting in countless hours helping it mature. It's far more difficult when they haven't really been involved. Ed -- [email protected] mailing list
