This letter is about a partnership agreement.
There have been ( so far ) two main questions:
legal liability among partners:
Partners are strictly liable for the contracts and misdeeds - i.e. anything
and everything - that a partner does In The Scope Of The Partnership.
In other words, you limit liability by limiting the business purposes. The
business purpose would be "to create a freeware multimedia engine capable of
reading and writing xTalk and xCard files, and any other programming
necessary. Said engine shall be freeware, and shall be distributed pursuant to
a license to be agreed upon. The partnership shall have no commercial motive
or objective.".
A partner would be liable for anything done by another partner _in _the _scope
_of _the _partnership.
Liability problems arise in two contexts:
Accidents: this is taken care of by a standard "use at your own risk" message
to be included in the license to be formed.
Partner makes a contract to purchase or sell : this can be taken care of by
specifically indicating that the partnership will neither acquire nor alienate
partnership property. It is also taken care of by the fact that the
partnership shall in fact undertake no pecuniary activity.
So risks of liability for contracts formed by your partners or accidents
created by the software are basically eliminated.
Ok?
SECOND ISSUE: will be posted in a follow on msg because i am still paranoid
about our new unix system...
Yikes. That type of voting charter is often called a consensus, or a strict
consensus vote to be more exact. IMNSHO that type of voting policy is not
worthy. In the real world, a strict consensus vote is ugly. I feel strongly
about this observation.
There are other, more creative, more democratic, more economical ways to
make decisions by an organization rather than the one person and one-vote
method, either for a majority or for a strict consensus. Often what happens
with a consensus -- the wheels of progress get stuck. Furthermore, the
harder decisions don't get rendered.
As an alternative, a percentage vote could be put into place as part of the
charter for the "membership" who has the right to vote.
Even with this discussion of the name, OpenKard, WildCard, Public Card,
etc,. etc., --- an percentage vote would be one of the very best ways to
select the name. It would also help in selecting out the top choices as
well. Case in point: Say I like one option to 0% -- but three other other
options equal --- then I'd split my 100% vote to 0, 33, 33, 34 percent. In
a two-way decision, if a voting member does NOT care one way or the other
about the outcome, that person can vote 50-50 -- and then leave the bulk of
the weight of the vote to be determined by those who care greatly about that
specific issue. In this way, voters can vote percentages of support for
various choices.
We could also say that a specific percent vote of some higher percentage
(say 75%) would be necessary to get a major element changed, -- example:
allowing for a new partner to join the ranks.
Mark Rauterkus
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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