On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 3:21 PM, William L. Thomson Jr. <wlt...@o-sinc.com> wrote: > > The council has no power > over Trustees, and Trustees do have legal power over all of Gentoo.
Sure, just keep in mind that legally Gentoo is basically nothing but a name and a logo. The Trustees could ask the community to stop using the name and logo, but in practice that would be about all they could do, in a hypothetical world where the Trustees and the Community were in some kind of conflict (which is unlikely in practice). The actual distro is largely community-run. Gentoo isn't like Redhat. It isn't a legal entity that happens to have a community. It is more of a community that happens to have a legal entity. Since the Foundation doesn't actually have any employees it is actually fairly limited in its ability to make things happen in the real world. With its funding it is actually fairly limited in making things happen legally as well. Its main function at this time (IMO) is to protect the name so that somebody else who has more money doesn't tell us to stop using it, and to pay for moderate expenses. > Which is some what strange as Trustees can be responsible for the actions of > others. Despite having no say in such matters till it becomes a legal issue. As long as the Trustees aren't violating any laws or blatantly ignoring their violation I doubt they'd have much personal liability to outsiders. The Foundation has more liability, but really the main risk there is losing whatever donations are sitting around unspent and maybe having somebody tell us we can't call ourselves Gentoo. The practical independence of the community from the Foundation works both ways. Having to change our name would be inconvenient, but it is still an unlikely outcome as we do try to be reasonably careful. -- Rich
