Hallo Guus! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and for your leadership on
this issue.
I'd like to tug on one thread below.
On 3/4/26 6:01 AM, Guus der Kinderen wrote:
On the suggestion of working without a legal entity: I do have some
concern specifically around intellectual property. How would IP be
handled in that scenario?
Although in general I'm not a big believer in the concept of
intellectual property [1] and that might be coloring my thoughts on this
topic, I do wonder exactly what the threat model is regarding the
protocol specifications that "we" define (right now "we" is the XSF, but
in the future "we" could run something more like an open-source
community, or to be pedantic an open-protocol community). Here are some
possibile threats, with my comments on likelihood and potential damage.
1. Other organizations could fork our specs.
Likelihood: low (I'm not aware of any such organizations)
Damage: medium (I suppose it could be confusing to have multiple
versions of the same protocol produced by different organizations)
2. Change control could be unclear.
Likelihood: low (it seems to me that protocol developers would still
want their specs to be published in the primary "repository" even if we
don't have a legal organization behind that publishing location)
Damage: medium (similar to #1 above)
3. The community could fragment.
Likelihood: medium (if we no longer have an "official" place to do the
work, then protocol developers might go off and define their own
extensions ... but in fact we've had this situation for a long time with
custom extensions defined by companies and open-source projects, and
it's not clear to me that having a *legal* organization is necessary to
solve this "problem" - if indeed it is a problem)
Damage: medium (as noted, we've actually been dealing with this risk
since the beginning and I think we've worked through it pretty well)
Do folks disagree with my assessment of these threats, or are there
other significant threats that I haven't listed here?
Peter
[1] https://stpeter.im/writings/essays/publicdomain.html
